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byH?K'^:^&C^W... February 19, 1886 



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WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH! 



TWO EDWBURGH LECTURES /o^^^^^^l?^^ 

"EB 10 1886 



By JOHN STUAET BLACKIE 



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PEEFATORY NOTE. 

The following Lectures were prepared for 
the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, 
and were delivered, with the exception of a 
few passages, before audiences consisting of 
Members of that Institution on the evenings 
of 8th and 11th December in the present 
year. 



Edinburgh, December, 1885. 



THE STATE. 



THE STATE. 

"ndnsp teXegoBsv f5eXri6Toy tSv Z,c6oov avBpooito'i 
ovTGD Hai ;i;ffi?pzd0£r r6/.iov nai diKrji x^'^P'^^''^^'^ Ttdvroov. 

—Aristotle. 

HiSTOEY, whether founded on reliable record, 
or on monuments, or on the scientific analysis 
of the gi'eat fossil tradition called language, 
knows nothing of the earliest beginnings. 
The seed of human society, like the seed of 
the vegetable growth, lies underground in 
darkness, and its earliest processes are invisi- 
ble to the outward eye. Speculations about 
the descent of the primeval man from a 
monkey, of the primeval monkey from an 
ascidian, and of the primeval ascidian from a 
protoplastic bubble, though they may act as 
a potent stimulus to the biological research of 
the hour, certainly never can form the start- 
ing-point of a profitable philosophy of history. 



6 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

As revealed in Mstory, man is an animal, not 
only generically different from, but character- 
istically antagonistic to tlie brute. That which 
makes him a man is precisely that which no 
brute possesses, or can by any process of train- 
ing be made to possess. The man can no 
more be developed out of the brute than the 
purple heather out of the granite rock which 
it clothes. The relation of the one to the 
other is a relation of mere outward attachment 
or dependency — like the relation which exists 
between the painter's easel and the picture 
which is painted on it. The easel is essential 
to the picture, but it did not make the picture, 
nor give even the smallest hint toward the 
making of it. So the monkey, as a basis, may 
be essential to the man without being in any 
way participant of the divine indwelling X6yo^ 
which makes a man a man. The two are related 
only as all things are related, inasmuch as they 
are all shot forth from the great fountain-head 
of all vital forces, whom we justly call God. 

The distinctive character of man as revealed 
in history is threefold. Man is an inventive 
animal, and he does not invent from a com- 



THE STATE. 7 

pulsion of nature, as bees make cells or as 
swallows build nests. These are all prescribed 
operations which the animal must perform ; 
but the inventive faculty in man is free, in 
such a manner that the course of its action 
cannot be foreseen or calculated. It revels in 
variety, and, above all things, shuns that uni- 
formity which is the servile province of brute 
activity. A man may live in a hole like a fox, 
but his proper humanity is shown by building 
a house and inventing a style of architecture. 
A man can sing like a bird, but — what the 
bird cannot do — he can make a harp or an 
organ. He can scrape with his nails like a 
terrier, but, as a man manifesting his proper 
manhood, he prefers to make a shovel of wood 
and a hatchet of stone or iron. The other 
animals, however cunning, and often wonder- 
fully adaptable in their instincts, are mere 
machines. Man makes machines. In this re- 
spect he is justly entitled to look upon himself 
as the God to the lower animals, just as the 
sheriff in the counties by delegated right rep- 
resents the supreme authority of the Crown. 
But, above all things, man is a progressive 



8 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

animal, — not merely progressive as the grass 
grows from root to blade and from blade to 
blossom to perfect its individual type of vege- 
table life, but advancing from stage to stage 
and mounting from platform to platform for 
the perfectionation of the race ; nor even pro- 
gressive as plants and fruits are improved by 
culture and favorable surroundings, and what 
is called forcing, or as the breed of sheep and 
cattle is improved by selection, ^o doabt 
progress of this kind is made by man as well 
as by plants and brutes ; but his most dis- 
tinctive human progress is made, not by im- 
position from without, but by projection from 
within. These projections from within are 
what in philosophical language is called the 
idea ; they proceed from the essential nature 
of mind, whose imperial function it is to dic- 
tate forms, as it is the servile function of the 
senses to receive impressions. These intelli- 
gent forms, coming directly from the divine 
source of all excellence, and projected from 
within with sovereign authority to shape for 
themselves an outward embodiment, constitute 
what in art, in literature, in religion, and in 



THE STATE. 9 

social organisms, is called tlie ideal ; and man 
may accordingly be defined as an animal that 
lives by the conception of ideals, and whose 
destiny it is to spend his strength, and, if need 
be, to lay down his life, for the realization of 
snch ideals. The steps of this realization, often 
slow and painful, and always difficult, are what 
we mean by human progress ; and it is the 
dominant characteristic of man, of which 
among the lower animals there is not a ves- 
tige, neither indeed could be ; for so long as 
they have no ideas, neither reason nor the 
outward expression of reason in language — 
two things so closely bound together that the 
wise Greeks expressed them both by one 
word, Xoyoi — so long must it be ridiculous to 
think of them shaping their career according 
to an inborn type of progressive excellence. To 
do so is exclusively human. Hence our poems, 
our high art, our churches, our legislations, 
our apostleships, our philosophies, our social 
arrangements and devices, our speculations 
and schemes of all kinds, which, though they 
are sometimes foolish, and always more or less 
inadequate, deliver the strongest possible proof 



10 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

that man is an animal who will rather die and 
embrace martyrdom than be content to live as 
the brntes do, neither spurred with the hope 
of progress nor borne aloft on the wings of the 
ideal. 

Of the very earliest state of human society, 
as we have already said, history teaches noth- 
ing ; but, as man is a progressive animal, and 
the plan of Providence with regard to him 
seems plain to let him shift for himself and learn 
to do right by blundering, as children learn to 
walk by tumbling, we may safely say that the 
easier, more obvious, and more rude forms of 
living together must have preceded the more 
difficult, the more complex, and the more 
polished. And in perfect consistency with 
this presumption, we find three social plat- 
forms rising one above the other in human 
value, duly accredited either by monuments, 
by popular tradition, or by the evidence of 
comparative philology. These three are— (1) 
The prehistoric or stone period, from which 
such a rich store of monuments has been set 
up in the Copenhagen Museum, and the exist- 
ence of which is indicated in Gen. iv. 22 as 



THE STATE. 11 

antecedent to Tubal Cain, the instructor of 
every artificer in brass and iron. (2) The 
shepherd or pastoral stage, represented by 
Abel (Gen. iv. 2), in which men subsisted from 
the easy dominance which they asserted over 
wild animals, and from fruits of the earth 
requiring no culture. (3) The agricultural 
stage, when cereal crops were systematically 
and scientifically cultivated, which, of course, 
implied the limitation of particular districts of 
ground to particular proprietors, and those 
agrarian laws which caused the Greek Demeter 
to be honored with the title of Qedjaocpopo^, or 
lawgiver — a step of marked and decided ad- 
vance, insomuch that we may justly attribute 
to it the redemption of society from the vagus 
concuhitus of the earliest times, and the firm 
establishment of the family, with all its 
sanctities and all its binding power, as the 
prime social monad. To the priestess of this 
goddess accordingly, among the Greeks, was 
assigned the function of ushering in the newly- 
married pair to the peculiar duties of their 
new social relation.^ 

* Plutarch conjugalia praecepta init. 



13 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

The fact that the family is the great social 
monad, as it is undoubtedly one of the oldest 
and most accredited facts in human tradition, 
so it presents to us perhaps the most important 
of all the lessons that history teaches — a lesson 
as necessary to be inculcated at the present hour 
as at the earliest stages of social advance ; and 
Aristotle certainly was never more in the 
right than when he emphasized this truth 
strongly in traversing Plato' s fancy of making 
the state the universal family, to the utter ab- 
sorption of all subordinated family monads. 
Here, as in one or two other matters, the great 
idealist would be wiser than God ; and so his 
philosophy, so far as that point was concerned, 
became only a more sublime attitude of folly. 
The importance of the family, as the divinely 
instituted social monad, depends manifestly 
on the happy combination and harmonious 
blending of authority and love which grow out 
of its constitution — two elements with the full 
development and true balance of which the 
well-being and happiness of all societies is 
intimately bo and up. The fine moral training 
which the family relation alone can inspire we 



THE STATE. 13 

find not only at our own door, in the fidelity 
and self-sacrificing devotion of onr noble 
Highlanders, who derived their inspiration 
from the clan system, of which the family love 
and respect is the binding element,^ as con- 
trasted with the slavish system of vassalage, 
the badge of feudalism ; but in the habits and 
institutions of the three great ancient peoples 
to whom modern Europe owes its higher civ- 
ilization, Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, es- 
pecially the last,^ the great masters of the 
difficult art of government, who, to use 
Mommsen's phrase, carried out the unity of 
the family through the virtue of paternal 
authority ''with an inexorable consistency," 
the beneficial effect of which could not fail to 
display itself in social life far beyond the 
sphere from which it originally emanated ; for 
obedience to authority is the fundamental 
postulate of all possible societies. With the 
family, if not absolutely, certainly with the 
best and normal state of it, most closely con- 

^ The word clan is the familiar, well-known Celtic word for 
children. 

2 "Nnlli alii sunt homines qui talem in liberos habeant 
potestatem qualemnoshabemus." Institut. i. 9, 2. 



14 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

nected is monogamy ; for, thongli instances 
of bigamy and polygamy, from Lamecli down- 
ward (Gen. iv. 19) to King David and 
Solomon in tlie Old Testament history, crop 
up here and there in the oldest times, and 
even in the post-Babylonian period, without 
any formal mark of disapprobation, yet it is 
quite certain that the Greeks and Romans 
were guided by a sound social instinct when 
they held the practice of bigamy to be incon- 
sistent with the proper constitution of a 
family. What troubles are apt to arise from 
a multiplication of contending wives and am- 
bitious mothers the latter story of King David 
tells in more unhappy episodes than one ; and 
generally it may be laid down as one of the 
great lessons of history that polygamy, in 
every shape, is one of those acts of Oriental 
self-indulgence which may be sweet in the 
mouth, but has a very strong tendency to be 
bitter in the belly, and therefore ought by all 
means to be avoided. 

By the instinct of aggregation, which be- 
longs to an essentially social animal, families 
will club together into townships or villages, 



THE STATE. 15 

and townsMps will be centralized into states. 
Humanity without townships would degenerate 
into tigerlioodj or whatever type of animal ex- 
istence might express an essentially self-con- 
tained, solitary, and selfish creature ; town- 
ships without that sort of headship which the 
word State implies, would make society cry 
halt at a stage of loosely-connected aggregates 
which would render common action for any 
high human purpose extremely difficult, and, 
in the general case, as human beings are, im- 
possible. Hence the centralization of the Attic 
townships at Athens in the legendary tradi- 
tions of the Athenians attributed to Theseus ;^ 
hence also the lax confederation of the earliest 
Latin states finder the headship of Albalonga ; 
and, after the humiliation of that old strong- 
hold, the more closely-cemented union of those 
states under the hegemony of Eome.^ What- 

^ Thucyd. ii. 15. The Athenians went further, and attributed 
to the son of ^geus the creation of their democracy (Pausan., 
Ait. iii.) ; but this, of course, was only the popular instinct, every- 
where active, which loves to heap all graces upon the head of a 
favorite hero. 

2 See the words of the Latin league, Dionys. Hal. vi. 95, contrast 
ing strongly with tlie origiaal collection of autonomous villages 
described by Strabo, v. 229, Hard Koofxai avTovo/j,ei6Bai, 



16 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

ever may be the evils connected with the 
growth of large towns, especially when, as in 
modern times, they have been allowed to swell 
to enormons magnitude without regulation or 
control, it is one of the undoubted lessons of 
universal history that the social stimulus 
necessary for the creation of vigorous thought, 
no less than the centralized force indispensable 
to great achievement, is found only in the large 
towns. The Christians were called Christians 
first at Antioch ; and, had there been no Rome 
to unify a little Latium, there would have been 
no great Roman Empire to amalgamate the 
rude barbarians of the North with the smooth 
civilization of the South by the force of a com- 
mon law and a common language ^ 

The form of government natural to such in- 
fant states as the expansion of the original 
social monad, the familt, is a loose but not 
unkindly mixture of monarchy, democracy, 
and aristocracy — the aristocracy being always 

1 The influence of the great city in centralizing the villages and 
making a state possible was in Greece philologically stereotyped 
by the fact that for city and state the language had only one 
word, TCoXii. The city was the state in the same sense that the 
head is the body, for without the head no living body could be. 



THE STATE. 17 

the preponderating element. In the single 
family, of course, we have only the monarchi- 
cal element in the father, and the democratic 
element in the children ; but, as families ex- 
pand into townships, it could not be but that 
the heads of the families composing it, partly 
from their age and experience, partly from the 
force of individual character, should form a 
sort of natural aristocracy, while the less nota- 
ble and less prominent members would form 
the drji^ioi, or great body of the constantly in- 
creasing multitude of the associated families. 
Below these three dominant elements of the 
body social, there would always be found a 
loose company of dependents and onhangers — 
the class called QrjvEi in Homer (Od., iv. 644), 
and in the Solonian constitution — who had no 
civic rights any more than the serfs and vas- 
sals of our medieval feudalism. The weak- 
ness of the monarchical and the strength of the 
aristocratic elements in the early societies 
arose from the original equality of the heads 
of families, and from the jealousy with which 
they would naturally look on any functions of 
superiority exercised by any of their order 



18 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

naturally no better tlian themselves. The 
king, accordingly, like Agamemnon in Homer, 
wonld claim the homage which the title im- 
plies only for purposes of common action ; and 
even in such cases would always be kept in 
check by a {3ovXri, or council of the aristocracy, 
of whose will properly he was only the execu- 
tive hand ; while the great mass of the people, 
occupied with the labors that belong to an 
agricultural and pastoral population, and un- 
accustomed to the large views which states- 
manship and generalship require, would come 
together only on rare occasions of peculiar 
urgency. 

The element in that loose triad of social 
forces that was first formulated into a more 
distinct type, and endowed with more impera- 
tive efBlciency, was the kingship. The power 
of the king was increased, which of course im- 
plies that the power of the people, and specially 
of the aristocracy, was diminished. And here 
let it be observed generally that the progress 
of civilization in its natural and healthy career 
is the progress of limitation and the curtail- 
ment in various ways of that freedom which 



THE STATE. 19 

originally belonged to every member of the 
community. The tanned savage of the back- 
woods is the freest man in existence ; next to 
him, the nomad or the wandering gipsy, such 
as may still be seen in their glory at St. James' 
fair in Kelso, whose house is at once his dwell- 
ing-place, his manufactory or place of busi- 
ness, and his travelling car ; least free is the 
civilized citizen hemmed in on all sides by 
police-officers, soldiers, sentinels, door-keep- 
ers, and game-keepers, and the whole fraternity 
of dignified but unpopular officials of various 
kinds whose business it is to the general pub- 
lic to say No ! This accretion of strength to 
the king proceeded first from his mere personal 
influence and the general deference paid to 
him during the continuance of a prolonged 
and easily-exercised sovereignty ; all classes, 
even the aristocracy, whose ambition is thus 
kept in check and their perilous enmities 
softened, feel the benefit of a wise head and a 
firm hand ; but the party specially benefited by 
the kingship is the demos ; for this body, from 
its position peculiarly liable to be trampled on 
by an insolent aristocracy, naturally looks up to 



so WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the king as the father of the whole family, 
who, on his part, feels his position strength- 
ened and his respect increased by performing 
with tact and firmness the delicate functions 
of a mediator. But the great social force 
which operates in giving prominence and pre- 
dominance to the monarchy is War ; and, 
though war is unquestionably an evil, it is an 
evil only as death is, and a form of dying ac- 
companied not seldom with an exhibition of 
more manhood than the experience of many a 
peaceful deathbed can show. In fact, as stout 
old Balmerino said on the scaffold in 1746, 
*' The man who is not ready to die is not fit to 
live ;" that is, we hold our life under the con- 
dition that we may at any time be called on to 
sacrifice it, whether for the preservation of our 
own self-respect, or for the integrity of the 
community of which we are a member. All 
great nations, in fact, have been cradled in 
war, the Hebrews no less than the Greeks 
and Eomans ; and it is only an amiable senti- 
mentalism, pardonable in women, but inexcus- 
able in men, that, in contemplation of the 
hard blows, red wounds, and gashed bodies 



THE STATE. 31 

witli wMch war is accompanied, will allow 
itself to forget the hardiliood, endurance, cour- 
age, self-sacrifice, and devotion to public duty, 
of which, under Providence, it has always been 
the great training school.^ There is no pro- 
fession that I know more favorable to the 
growth of noble sentiment and manly action 
than that of the soldier ; and to its beneficial 
action in the formation of States every page 
of history bears flaming testimony. War, in 
fact, is the principal agent in producing that 
unification so absolutely necessary to social 
existence, but which is lost so soon as the 
headship of the common father of the expand- 
ed clan ceases to be recognized. Thus it w^as 
under the compulsion of war from their Lom- 
bardian neighbors on the west and Sclavonians 
on the east that the petty democratic com- 
munities, which after the disruption of the 
Koman Empire occupied the Yenetian isles, 
found themselves, in the year 697, obliged to 
elect a king for life, wisely masking his abso- 

^ 6 drpariGOTiKdi (Hoi itoXXd ex^i' fJ-e.prj riji dpErrji. — 
Aristot. Pol. ii. 9. St. Paul also frequently in the Epistles, and 
Clemens Romanus (Oxon. 1633, p. 48) refers to the military pro- 
fession as a great school of manly virtue. 



SS WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

lute antliority under the name of Doge or 
Duke. And in a similar fasMon the situation 
of the Piedmontese, constantly forced to de- 
fend themselves against Galilean and Teutonic 
ambition, begot in them a stoutness of self- 
assertion and a general manhood of character 
which up to the present hour has placed them 
in favorable contrast to the inhabitants of the 
southern half of the peninsula ; and the man- 
hood displayed by the Counts of Savoy in 
asserting their independence against great 
odds was no doubt the cause why, in the 
Peace of Utrecht in 1713, their lords were 
allowed to assume and maintain the title of 
kings — a circumstance which gave rise to the 
saying of Frederick the Great of Prussia, that 
the lords of Savoy were kings by virtue of their 
locality.^ This is certainly true, not only of 
Sardinia, but of all States that ever rose above 
the loose aggregation of the original town- 
ships. It was the necessity of adjusting mat- 
ters with troublesome neighbors that caused a 
perpetual succession of petty wars ; and these 
could not be conducted without a prolongation 

1 Spalding's Italy, ii. p. 384. 



THE STATE. 23 

of the power of the successful general, which 
acted practically as a kingship. The success- 
ful general in such times did not require to 
usurp a title which the people were forward to 
force upon him ; and only a few, we may 
imagine, like Gideon (Judges viii. 22), had 
virtue enough to remain contented with the 
distinction belonging to a private station when 
the grace of the crown and the authority of the 
sceptre were formally pressed upon them by 
a grateful people. So in Greece we find an 
early kingship signalized by the names of 
^geus, Theseus, and Codrus ; so in Rome a 
succession of seven kings, more or less dis- 
tinctly outlined, the last of whom, Tarquin 
the Proud, stands forward as the head of the 
great Latin league, and entering in this 
capacity into a formal treaty with Carthage, 
the great commercial State of the Mediterra- 
nean. Closely connected with war, or, more 
properly, as the natural development of it in 
its more advanced stages, we must mention 
Conquest ; that is, the violent imposition of 
the results of a foreign civilization on the 
native social foundations of any country. 



24 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

Here, no doubt, there may often be on fclie 
conquering side something very different from 
a manly self-assertion — viz., self-aggrandize- 
ment at the expense of an innocent neighbor, 
greed of territory, lust of power, and the 
vanity of mere military glory, which our brill- 
iant neighbors the French were so fond to 
have in their mouth. The virtue of war as a 
training school of civic manhood does by no 
means exclude the operation of many forces 
far from admirable in their motive ; and it is 
the presence of these unholy influences, no 
doubt piously brooded over, that has gene- 
rated in the breasts of our mild friends the 
Quakers that anti-bellicose gospel which they 
preach with such lovable persistency. But 
whatever the motives of famous conquerors 
have been, the results of their achievements in 
the great history of society have been most 
important. The imposition of a foreign type 
on the peoples of Western Asia by the brill- 
iant conquests of Alexander the Great, gave 
to the whole of that valuable part of the world, 
along with the rich coast of J^orthern Africa, 
a common medium of culture of the utmost 



THE STATE. 35 

importance to the future civilization of the 
race. The imposition of the JSTorman yoke 
900 years ago on this island gave to the con- 
tentious Saxon kingdoms, by a single vigorous 
stroke from without, that social consistency 
which the bloody strife of ^ve centuries of 
petty kings and kinglets among themselves 
had failed to produce ; while in India the im- 
position of the most highly advanced mercan- 
tile and Christian civilization of the West on 
crude masses of an altogether diverse type of 
Asiatic society, presents to the thoughtful 
student of history a problem of assimilation of 
an altogether unique character, the final solu- 
tion of which, under the action of many com- 
plex forces, no most sagacious human intel- 
lect at the present moment can divine. On 
the other hand, it cannot be denied that the 
blessings which conquest brings with it, 
when vigorously managed and wisely used, are 
lightly turned into a bane whenever the power 
which has the force to conquer has not the 
wisdom to administer ; of which unblissful 
lack of administrative capacity and assimilat- 
ing genius the conquests of the Turks in 



26 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

Europe, and of tlie English in Ireland, present 
a most instructive example. 

Tlie monarchies created in the above fashion, 
by the combination of old patriarchal habits 
with military necessities, however firmly root- 
ed they may appear at the start, carry with 
them a certain germ of dissatisfaction, which, 
under the influence of popular irritability, 
seriously endangers their permanence, and 
may at any time break up their consistency. 
The causes of such dissatisfaction are chiefly 
the following: — (1) The original motive for 
creating a king, the pressure of foreign war, 
as war cannot last forever, in time of peace 
will cease to operate, and the instinct of indi- 
vidual liberty, which belongs to all men, 
unless when violently stamped out, will re- 
vive, and cause the subjection of all men to 
the will of one to be looked on with disfavor. 
(2) This feeling will be specially strong with 
the apidroi^ or natural aristocracy, whose in- 
dividual importance must diminish as the 
power of the king increases. (3) A great 
danger will arise from the fixation of the order 
of succession to the throne. The natural ten- 



THE STATE. S7 

dency will be to follow tlie example of succes- 
sion in private families, and recognize the right 
of the son to walk into the public heritage of 
his father ; but the additional influence thus 
given to the king will have a tendency to 
sharpen the jealousy of the nobles. And, 
again, the son may be a weakling or a fool, 
and utterly unfit to play the part of a supreme 
ruler with that mixture of intelligence, firm- 
ness, and tact which the royal function for its 
fair and full action requires. (4) And if, in 
order to avoid these evils, the elective princi- 
ple is maintained, either absolutely or within 
certain limits, the tendency to faction inherent 
in all aristocracies, stimulated by the potent 
spur of a competition for power, will be in- 
creased ; and this factious yeast will work so 
potently in the blood of the nobles that they 
will either reduce the power of the king to a 
mere name, and change the government into 
an exclusive oligarchy, as in Venice, or they 
will even go the length of calling in foreign 
arbiters to heal their dissensions, which, as in 
the case of Poland, will naturally end in sub- 
jection to some foreign power ; or, lastly, they 



28 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

will dispense with, tlie kingsMp altogether, 
and return to their original mixture of aris- 
tocracy and democracy with more firmly- 
defined functions and more reliable guaran- 
tees. (5) This result may be precipitated by 
some outbreak of that insolence which is so 
naturally fostered by the possession of abso- 
lute power ; the sacredness of personal prop- 
erty and the reverence of ancestral possession 
will not be respected by some Ahab of the 
day ; some young Tarquin or Hipparchus may 
cast his lustful eye on the fair daughter of an 
humble citizen; and then will be unsheathed 
the sword of a Brutus, and then uprise the 
song of a Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which 
will sound a long knell to monarchy, during 
the manhood of a free, an independent, a self- 
reliant, and a self-governing people. 

The system of self-government thus intro- 
duced, as the natural fruit of the elements out 
of which it arose, would be a mixture of aris- 
tocracy and democracy, with a decided pre- 
dominance of the former element at starting, 
but with a gradually increasing momentum on 
the side of the inferior factor in proportion as 



THE STATE. 39 

the mass of the people excluded from aristo- 
cratic privileges by a necessary law of social 
growth advanced in numbers and in social im- 
portance. Greece and Rome, or rather Athens 
and Rome, present to us here two types from 
which important lessons may be learned. In 
both the discarding of the kings w^as the work 
of the aristocracy ; but, while the germ of the 
democratic element was equally strong in 
both, in Athens, partly from the genius of the 
people, partly from peculiar circumstances, 
this germ blossomed into an earlier, a more 
marked, and a more characteristic manhood ; 
whereas in Rome, in the most brilliant period 
of its political action, the form of government 
might rather be defined as a strong aristocracy 
limited by a strong democracy than a pure de- 
mocracy, to which category Athens undoubtedly 
belongs. In both States the aristocratic element 
did not submit to the necessary curtailment of 
its power without a struggle ; but in Athens 
the names of Solon (600 B.C.), Clisthenes, 
Aristides, and Pericles distinctly marked the 
early formation of a democracy almost totally 
purged from any remnant of aristocratic in- 



30 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

fluence, at an epoch in its development corre- 
sponding to which we find Rome pursuing her 
system of world-wide conquest under a system 
of compromise between the patrician and the 
plebeian element, similar in some sort to what 
we see before our eyes at the present moment 
in our own country. To Athens, therefore, 
we look, in the first place, for an answer to 
the question. What does history teach in 
regard to the virtue of a purely democratic 
government? And here we may safely say 
that, under favorable circumstances, there is 
no form of government which, while it lasts, 
has such a virtue to give scope to a vigorous 
growth and luxuriant fruitage of various man- 
hood as a pure democracy. Instead of choking 
and strangling, or at least depressing, the free 
self-assertion of the individual, by which alone 
he feels the full dignity of manhood, such a 
democracy gives a free career to talent and 
civic efiiciency in the greatest number of capa- 
ble individuals ; but it does not follow that, 
though in this regard it has not been surpassed 
by any other form of government, it is there- 
fore absolutely the best of all forms of govern- 



THE STATE. 31 

ment. All that we are warranted to say is, as 
Cornewall Lewis does, ^ that without a strong 
admixture of the democratic spirit humanity 
in its social form cannot achieve its highest 
results ; of which truth, indeed, we have the 
most striking proof before our eyes in our own 
happy island, where, even before the time 
which Mr. Green happily designates as Puri- 
tan England, powerful kings had received a 
lesson that as they had been elected so they 
might be dismissed from office by the voice of 
London burghers. Neither, on the other hand, 
does it follow from the shortness of the bright 
reign of Athenian democracy — not more than 
200 years from Clisthenes to the Macedonians 
— that all democracies are short-lived, and 
must pay, like dissipated young gentlemen, 
with premature decay for the feverish abuse 
of their vital force. Possible no doubt it is 
that, if the power of what we may call a sort 
of. Athenian Second Chamber, the Areiopagus, 
instead of being weakened as it was by Aris- 
tides and Pericles, had been built up accord- 
ing to the idea of ^schylus and the intelligent 

1 On Method in Political Science. 



3S WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

aristocrats of his day, such, a body, armed, like 
our House of Lords, with an effective negative 
on all outbursts of popular rashness, might 
have prevented the ambition of the Athenians 
from launching on that famous Syracusan 
expedition which exhausted their force and 
maimed their action for the future. But the 
lesson taught by the short-lived glory of 
Athens, and its subjugation under the rough 
foot of the astute Macedonian, is not that 
democracies, under the influence of faction, 
and, it may be, not free from venality, wiH 
sell their liberties to a strong neighbor — for 
aristocratic Poland did this in a much more 
blushless way than democratic Greece — but 
that any loose aggregate of independent States, 
given more to quarrel among themselves than 
to unite against a common enemy, whether 
democratic, or aristocratic, or monarchical in 
their form of government, cannot in the long 
run maintain their ground against the firm 
policy and the well-massed force of a strong 
monarchy. Athens was blotted out from the 
map of free peoples at Chseronea, not because 
the Athenian people had too much freedom. 



THE STATE. 33 

but becanse the Greek States had too little 
unity. They v\^ere used by Philip exactly in 
the same way that jN'apoleon used the German 
States at the commencement of the present 
century. Divide et iinfera is the politician's 
most familiar maxim, which, when wisely and 
persistently applied, whether by an ancient 
Macedonia or a modern Kussia, will always 
give a strong monarchy a decided advantage 
over every other form of government. Sur- 
round me with a belt of petty XDrincipalities, 
says the despot, however highly civilized and 
however well governed, and I shall know to 
make them play my game and work them- 
selves into confusion, till the hour comes when 
I may appear as a god to allay by my inter- 
vention the troubles which I have fostered by 
my intrigues. 

So much for Athens. Let us now see what 
lessons are to be learned from Eome. And 
here, on the threshold, it is quite plain that 
the abolition of kingship goes in the first place 
to strengthen the aristocracy, on whom as a 
body the supreme functions exercised by the 
monarch naturally devolve. The highly aris- 



34 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

tocratic type of tlie early Roman republic, un- 
limited from above by any superior power, and 
with, only a sliglit occasional check from a ple- 
beian citizenship in the tender bud, is univer- 
sally admitted. Plainly enough also it stands 
written on the face of the early history of the 
Commonwealth that the administration of the 
aristocracy was marked in no ordinary degree 
by all that exclusiveness, insolence, selfish- 
ness, and rapacity, which are the besetting sins 
of an order of men cradled in hereditary con- 
ceit, and eating the bread not of labor, but of 
privilege, " das unwrlyesserliche JunkertJium^ ' ' 
as Mommsen calls them. To such an extent 
did they abuse the natural vantage ground of 
their social position that, while the great body 
of the substantial yeomanry, who shed their 
blood in a constant succession of petty wars 
for the safety of the State, were stinted of 
their natural reward and degraded from their 
rightful position, the insolent monopolizers 
of all dignities and privileges did not blush to 
take from the people their natural heritage in 
the public land, and, for the enlargement of their 
0V7n order, to deprive the State of its stoutest 



THE STATE. 35 

citizens, and the army of its most effective 
soldiers. The irritation produced by this in- 
solent and anti-social procedure of the old 
Roman landlords, by the law of reaction com- 
mon to all forces, produced as its natural con- 
sequence a revolt ; for, as it has been truly 
said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed 
of the Church, no less true is it in all history 
that the insolence of the aristocracy is the 
cradle of the democracy. That happened ac- 
cordingly in ancient Eome which Sismondi 
prophesied might happen in modern Scotland : 
"If the mighty thanes who rule in those trans- 
Grampian regions begin to think that they can 
do without the people, the people may begin 
to think they can do without them." ^ So at 
least the Eoman plebs thought when, in the 
year of the city 259, they marched in a body 
out to the Sacred Mount on the banks of the 
Anio, and refused to return to the city till 
their just claims had been conceded and their 
wrongs redressed. Their wrongs were re- 
dressed: conferences, concessions, and com- 
promises, in a hurried and blundering sort 

* Sismondi, Etudes sur V^conoinie politique^ Essai iv. 



36 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

of way, were made ; tribunes of tlie plebs 
were appointed, with the absolute power of 
stopping the whole machinery of the State 
with a single negation ; and thus was sown 
the seed of a democracy destined to grow into 
monstrous proportions, and ripen into the 
bloody blossom of a military despotism by 
the hands of the very class of persons who 
were chiefly interested in preventing it 

The different stages of the battle between 
plebeians and patricians, or, as we term it, 
Whig and Tory, as they evolved themselves 
by a social necessity from time to time, belong 
to the special history of Rome, not to the gen- 
eral philosophy of history with which we are 
here concerned. The seed of democracy sown 
at the Sacred Mount went on from one stage 
of expansion to another, breaking down every 
barrier of hereditary privilege between the 
mass of the people and the old aristocracy, 
till it ended in the Lex Hortensia^ passed 
j>. c. 288, which gave to all ordinances passed 
by the Comitia Trihuta — that is, the people 
assembled in local tribes and voting inde- 
pendently of all aristocratic check or cooper- 



THE STATE. 87 

ation — tlie full validity of law. And in this 
progress of equalization between class and 
class in a community, the Muse of history sees 
only a special illustration of a general law 
that every aristocracy contending for the 
maintenance of exclusive privilege against 
natural right fights a losing battle. But the 
necessity of the adjustment of the opposing 
claims of a conservative and a progressive 
body in the State is a very different thing 
from the fashion in which the adjustment may 
be made, and from the consequences that may 
grow out of the adjustment. Here there is 
room for any amount of wisdom, and unfor- 
tunately also for a large amount of blundering. 
H^o man can say that the Roman constitution 
as it stood, after the plebeians had broken 
through all aristocratic barriers, was a cun- 
ningly compacted machine, or that it afforded 
any strong guarantee against that degeneracy 
into license toward which all unreined de- 
mocracies naturally tend. But one thing cer- 
tainly was achieved. Out of the plebeian and 
patrician elements of the body social, no 
longer arrayed in hostile attitude, but front- 



38 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

ing one another with eqnal rights before the 
law, and adjusting their forces in a fairly- 
balanced equilibrium, there was formed a 
great political corporation, deliberative and 
administrative, which for independence, dig- 
nity, patriotism, and sagacity, used its author- 
ity in such a masterly style and to such 
world-wide issues that it has earned from 
Mommsen the complimentary acknowledg- 
ment of having been "the first political corpo- 
ration of all times. "^ This corporation was 
the Roman Senate, which ruled the policy 
of Rome for a period of 200 years, from the 
passing of the Hortensian Law through a 
long period of African and Asiatic wars down 
to the civil war of Sulla and Marios, 88 e.g. — 
a body of which we may perhaps best easily 
understand the composition and the virtue if 
we imagine the best elements of our House of 
Commons and the best elements of the House 
of Lords merged in one Supreme Assembly of 
practical wisdom, to the exclusion at once of 
the feverish factiousness and multitudinous 

* With which sentence Mr. Freeman agrees. Coinparative 
Politics, Lecture iii., p. 78. 



I'HE STATE. 3d 

babble of the one assembly, and tbe brainless 
obstructiveness and incurable blindness of 
hereditary class interests in the other. But 
there was something else in the mixed consti- 
tution of Rome besides the tried wisdom and 
the great practical weight of the Senate. 
What was that ? There was, in the first place, 
the evil of an elective kingship — for the Consul 
was really an annual king under a different 
name, as the President of the United States is 
a quadrennial king, with greatly more power 
while his kingship lasts than the Queen of 
Great Britain ; and this implied an annual fit 
of social fever, and the annual sowing of a 
germ of faction ready to shoot into luxuriance 
under the strong stimulant of the love of 
power. Then, as in the natural growth of 
society, a new aristocracy grew up, formed by 
the addition of the wealthy plebeian famxilies 
to the old family aristocracy, and along with it a 
new and numerous plebeian body, practically 
though not legally excluded from the privilege 
of the optimateSj the old antagonism of patri- 
cian and plebeian would revive, and the ques- 
tion arose. What machinery had the legislation 



40 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

of the previous centuries provided to prevent 
a collision and a rupture between tlie antago- 
nistic tendencies of the democratic and oli- 
garchic elements in the State ? 1 he answer 
is, None. The authority of the Senate, great 
as it was both morally and numerically, was 
antagonized by the coequal legislative author- 
ity of the Comitia Tributa — an assembly as 
open to any agitator for factious or revolu- 
tionary purposes as a meeting of a London 
mob in Hyde Park, and composed of elements 
of the most motley and loose description, 
ready at any moment to give the solemn sanc- 
tion of a national ordinance to any act of hasty 
violence or calculated party move which might 
flatter the vanity or feed the craving of the 
masses. But this was not all. The tribunate, 
originally appointed simply for the protection 
of the commonalty against the rude exercise 
of patrician power, had now grown to such 
formidable dimensions that the popular 
tribune of the day might become the most 
powerful man in the State, and only require 
reelection to constitute him into a king whose 
decrees the consuls and the senators must 



THE STATE. 41 

humiliate themselyes to register. Here was a 
machinery cunningly, one might think, con- 
structed for the purpose of working out its 
own disruption, even supposing both the pop- 
ular and aristocratic elements had been 
composed of average good materials. But they 
were not so. In the age of the Gracchi, 1 33 b. c . , 
the high sense of honor, the proud inheritance 
of an uncorrupted patrician body, and the 
shrewd sense and sobriety of a sound-hearted 
yeomanry, had equally disappeared. The 
aristocracy were corrupted by the wealth 
which flowed in from the spoils of conquest ; 
they had become lovers of power rather than 
lovers of Rome ; lords of the soil, not fathers 
of the people ; banded together for the narrow 
interests of their own order rather than for the 
general well-being of the community. The 
sturdy yeomanry again, of which the mass of 
the original popular assemblies had been com- 
posed, had partly dwindled away under mal- 
administration of the public lands, and partly 
were mixed up with motley groups of citizens 
of no fixed residence, and of a town rabble 
who could be induced to vote for anything by 



4S WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH « 

any man who knew to win their favor by a 
large distribution of Sicilian corn or the excit- 
ing luxury of gladiatorial shows ; in a word, 
the populus had become a plehs, or, in our 
language, the people a populace. Further- 
more, let it be noted that this people or popu- 
lace, tied down to meet only in Kome, as the 
high seat of Government, was called upon to 
deal with the administration of countries as far 
apart and as diverse in character as Madrid and 
Cairo, or Bagdad and Moscow are from Lon- 
don. Think of a mob of London artisans, on 
the motion of a Henry George, or even a ration- 
al Radical like Mr. Chamberlain, drummed 
together to pass laws on landed property 
and taxation through all that vast domain ! 
But so it was ; and most unfortunately also 
the original fathers of the agitation which, at 
the time of the Gracchi, ranged the great 
rulers of the world into two hostile factions, 
stabbing one another in the back and cutting 
one another' s throats, and plotting and coun- 
ter-plotting in every conceivable style of base- 
ness, after the fashion which is now being 
exemplified before us in Ireland, — the authors 



THE STATE. 43 

of tMs agitation were not the demagogues, but 
tlie aristocracy ; as indeed in all cases of gen- 
eral discontent, social fret, and illegal violence, 
the parties who are accused of stirring class 
against class are not the agitators who appear 
on the scene, but the maladministrators who 
made their appearance necessary. Man is an 
animal naturally inclined to obey and to take 
things quietly ; insurrection is too exjpensive 
an affair to be indulged in by way of recrea- 
tion ; and there is no truth in the philosophy 
of history more certain than that whenever the 
multitude of the ruled rebel against their 
rulers, the original fault — I do not say the 
whole blame, for as things go on from bad to 
worse there may be blame and blunders on 
both sides — but the original fault and germina- 
tive cause of discontent and revolt unquestion- 
ably lies with the rulers. Whatever may be said 
about Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, 
there can be no doubt that in the case of 
Rome the original cause of the democratizing 
of the old constitution and the over-riding of 
senatorial authority by tribunician ordinances 
was the senators themselves, who, in direct 



44 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

contravention of the, public law of the State, 
with that greed for more land which is the be- 
setting sin of every aristocracy, had quartered 
themselves, after the fashion of colonial squat- 
ters, on the public lands, and refused to sur- 
render them to the State till compelled by the 
cry of popular right against might, raised by 
such patriotic and self-sacrificing agitators as 
the Gfracchi — patriotic men who attained their 
object at last by the only means in their power, 
but means so drastic that, like doctor's drugs, 
they drave out one devil by bringing in a score, 
and paid for the partial healing of an incurable 
disease by destroying forever the balance of 
the constitution, and inaugurating with their 
own martyr blood one of the most woful epochs 
in human history — an epoch varied by period- 
ical assassinations and consummated by whole- 
sale butcheries. 

I said the Gracchi attained their object, and 
that by appointing a Commission for a distri- 
bution of the public lands, such as the friends 
of the crofters in the Highlands now propose 
for the repeopling of the old depopulated 
homes of the clan. But I said also that the 



THE STATE. 45 

disease under which Rome labored was incura- 
ble. How was this ? Simply because, what- 
ever might have been the merits of the special 
Agrarian Law carried by the Gracchi, the vio- 
lent steam by which the State machine was 
moved remained the same, the clumsy machine 
itself remained, and the materials with which 
it had to deal in a long and critical course of 
foreign conquest became every year larger and 
more unmanageable. It was not to be expected 
either, on the one hand, that a strong and in- 
fluential aristocracy should die with a single 
kick, or, on the other, that a democracy, which 
had once learned the power of a popular flood 
to break down aristocratic dams, would cease 
to exercise that power when a convenient oc- 
casion offered. And so the strife of oligarchic 
and plebeian factions continued. The politi- 
cal struggle, as always happens in such cases, 
became a struggle for personal supremacy ; the 
sanguinary street battle between the younger 
Gracchus and the Consul Ojjimius, though fol- 
lowed by a lull for a season, was renewed after 
a few years in more startling form and much 
bloodier issues, first between Marius and Sulla, 



46 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

and finally between Csesar and Pompey. Such 
a succession of embittered civil wars could end 
only in exhaustion and submission ; and this 
is the last emphatic lesson which the history 
of Eome has taught to the governors of the 
people. Every constitution of mixed aristo- 
cratic and democratic elements which fails by 
kindly control on the one side, and reasonable 
demand on the other, to achieve that balance 
of those antagonizing forces which means good 
government, must end in a military despotism. 
That which will not bridle itself must be 
bridled ; and when constant irritation, fretful 
Jars, and cruel collisions are the bloody fruit 
of unchastened liberty, slavery and stagnation 
seem not too high a price to pay for peace. 

I have enlarged on the development and de- 
cay of the Roman republic, not only because in 
point of political achievement Eome is by 
far the most notable of the great States of the 
world, but because in the struggle between aris- 
tocracy and democracy which was the salient 
feature of its history from the expulsion of the 
kings to the battle of Actium, it presents a very 
close and instructive parallel to what has been 



THE STATE. 47 

going on among ourselves from tlie revolu- 
tion settlement of 1688 to the present hour. 
If for annual kings with large power we put 
hereditary kings with small power, the paral- 
lel is complete/ Let us now cast a glance, for 
time and space allow us no more, over some 
modern developments. The modern States of 
Europe have good reason, upon the whole, to 
think themselves fortunate in their having re- 
tained the kingship, which the Greeks and 
Romans rejected, either as their original type, 
or elevated and glorified from the dukedoms, 
margravates, and electorates with which they 
started. There cannot be much doubt, I im- 
agine, that, if the Eomans had retained their 
king in a hereditary or nearly hereditary form, 
he might have exercised a mediatorial function 
between the contending parties that would 
have prevented those bloody strifes and those 
ugly civic wounds with which the record of 
their political career stands now so sorrowfully 
defaced. In the experience of their own earli- 
est story, Servius Tullius had already shown 

1 This parallel has been noticed by the thoughtful Germans ; 
see particularly Zacharia Sulla, i. 40 . 



48 "WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

them liow a king in the strife of classes might 
step in by a jpeacef ul new model to open the 
ranks of a close aristocracy with dignity and 
safety to a rising democracy ; and in modern 
times the case of, Leopold II. of Tuscany does 
not stand alone as an example of what good 
service a wise king may do in the adjustment 
of contending claims and smoothing the march 
of necessary social transitions. In fact, the 
most democratic people among the ancients, 
in order to effect such an adjustment in a peace- 
ful way, had been obliged to make Solon a 
king for the nonce ; and the Homans, urged 
by a like social pressure, named their dictator, 
or reelected their consuls and their tribunes, 
in order to secure for the need of the moment 
that unity of counsel, energy of conduct, and 
moral authority which is the grand recom- 
mendation of the kingship. 'No doubt kings 
in modern as in ancient times have erred ; they 
have not been able always to keep themselves 
sober under the intoxicating influence of abso- 
lute power, and they have paid dearly for 
their errors ; but we were wise in this country, 
while beheading one despot and banishing 



THE STATE. 49 

another, to pimisli the offender withont abol- 
ishing the office. True, a thorough-going and 
sternly-consistent republican may ask, with 
an indignant sneer. What is the use of a king, 
when we have shorn him of all honors save the 
grace of a crown and the bauble of a sceptre — 
reduced him, in fact, to a mere machine to 
register the decrees of a democratic assembly? 
But such persons require to be reminded that 
there is nothing more dangerous, not only in 
political, but in all practical matters, than 
logical consistency ; that the most narrow- 
minded people are always the most consistent, 
and this for the very obvious reason that they 
have only room for one idea in their small 
brain chambers, whereas God's world contains 
many ideas, stiff ideas too, and given to battle, 
which must be brought into some friendly bal- 
ance or compromise, or set about throat-cut- 
ting on a large scale — a process to which con- 
sistent republicans have never shown a less 
bloody inclination than consistent monarchists. 
They must be reminded also that the person 
of the monarch is an incarnated, visible, and 
tangible symbol of the unity of the nation, of 



50 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

wMcli parties and factions are so apt to be for- 
getful ; and if onr logically-consistent republi- 
can may look on tMs as a matter of association 
and sentiment wMcIl lie will not acknowledge, 
lie must simply be told tkat the man wlio does 
not acknowledge the important place played 
by associations and sentiments in all matters 
of Church and State knows nothing of human 
nature, and is altogether unfit for meddling 
with the difficult and dangerous art of politics. 
He may write books, and lecture to coteries, 
and harangue electoral meetings, and delight 
himself largely in the reverberation of his own 
wisdom, but by all means let him not be a 
prime minister. To what ends logical consist- 
ency can lead a politician in high places 
Charles I. and Archbishop Laud learned when 
it was too late ; and the fate of these two high- 
perched worthies stands as a speaking lesson 
to all politicians, whether of the democratic or 
the monarchical type, how easy a thing it is 
for a man to be a good Christian and a con- 
sistent thinker, and yet on all political matters 
a perfect fool. 
Among the notable modern States three 



THE STATE. 51 

stand before ns with an exceptional prefer- 
ence for tlie democratic form of government — 
Switzerland, France, and tlie great trans- At- 
lantic Republic. These mnst be regarded 
with cnrious interest and kindly human sym- 
pathy as great social experiments, by no means 
to be prejudged and denounced by any sweep- 
ing conclusions made from the unfortunate 
breakdown of the two celebrated ancient re- 
publics. The experiment in these cases, as 
made in altogether different circumstances and 
under different conditions, cannot warrant 
any such denunciations. The representative 
system which now universally prevails, and 
which enables a most widely-scattered and 
diverse - minded population to vote with a 
coolness and a precision and a large survey 
of which the urban system of Greece and 
Rome never dreamed ; the general growth of 
intelligence among all classes through the ac- 
tion of cheap education and the large circula- 
tion of cheap books ; the rapid and ever more 
rapid travelling of contagious thought from 
the centre to the extreme limbs and flourishes 
of social unities; and, above all, let us hope 



62 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

the improved tone of social feeling in all the 
relations of man to man, wMcli we owe to the 
great Christian principle of living as brother 
with brother, and sister with sister, under a 
common heavenly fatherhood, — these are all 
forces largely operating in the present day 
which justify us in hoping that many a social 
experiment which signally failed with the an- 
cients may be crowned in the centuries which 
are now being inaugurated with encouraging 
success. Of the three which we have named, 
Switzerland is the country in which, from 
topographical peculiarities, the interests of 
jealous neighbors, and the traditional habits 
of a peasant population well trained to pro- 
vincial self-government, the permanence of a 
democratic federation may be prophesied with 
the greatest safety, but at the same time with 
the least interest to the general march of 
humanity. Ancient Rome, had it continued 
as compact and as little disturbed by external 
forces and internal fermentations as modem 
Switzerland, might have remained during the 
whole course of its career as sober-minded and 
as stable as in the days of Cincinnatus, and 



THE STATE. 53 

the yeomanry wMcli were displaced by huge 
absentee landlords, and Syrian or Sicilian 
slaves. The case of France is altogether dif- 
ferent. A republic in an over-civilized, highly- 
centralized, bureaucratically-governed coun- 
try, with a religiously hollow, hasty, violent, 
excitable, and explosive people, seems of all 
social experiments the least hopeful : and that 
is all that can wisely be said of it at present. 
But the social conditions in America are alto- 
gether different ; and the experiment of a great 
democratic republic for the first time in the 
history of the world — for Rome in its best 
times, as we have seen, was an aristocracy — 
will be looked on by all lovers of their species 
with the most kindly curiosity and the most 
hopeful sympathy. Here we have the stout, 
self-reliant, sober-minded Anglo-Saxon stock, 
well trained in the process of the ages to the 
difficult art of self-government ; here we have 
a constitution framed with the most cautious 
consideration, and with the most effective 
checks against the dangers of an over-riding 
democracy ; here also a people as free from 
any imminent external danger as they have 



54 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

unlimited scope for internal progress. Under 
no circumstances could the experiment of self- 
government, on a great scale, have been made 
with a more promising start. 'No doubt they 
have a difficult and slippery problem to per- 
form. The frequent recurrence of elections to 
the supreme magistracy has always been, and 
ever must be, the breeder of faction, the nurse 
of venality, and the spur of ambition. Once 
already has this Titanic confederacy, though 
only a hundred years old, by going through a 
process of a long, bitter, and bloody civil 
war, shown that the unifying machinery so 
cunningly put together by the conservative 
genius of a Washington, an Adams, and a 
Madison, was insufficient to hold in check the 
rebellious forces at war within its womb. No 
doubt also it were in vain to speak America 
free from those acts of gigantic jobbing, blush- 
less venality, and over-riding of the masses in 
various ways, which were working the ruin of 
Rome in the days of Jugurtha. The aristoc- 
racy of gold and the tyranny of capitalists in 
Christian New York has shown itself no less 
able to usurp the public land and defraud the 



THE STATE. 55 

people of their share in the soil than the lordly- 
aristocracy and the slave-dealing magnates of 
heathen Rome. Nevertheless we need not 
despair. The sins of American democracy 
may serve as a useful hint to us not rashly to 
tinker our own mixed constitution without 
waiting for a verdict on issues, which, as 
Socrates wisely says, lie with the gods ; nor, 
on the other hand, is there any wisdom in 
ascribing to the American form of govern- 
ment evils which, as belonging to human 
nature, crop up with more or less abundance 
under all forms of government, and which 
may be specially rife among ourselves. We 
also have our Glasgow banks, our bubble 
companies of all kinds, our heady specula- 
tions, our hot competitions, our over-produc- 
tions, our haste to be rich, our idol worship 
of mere material magnificence, — these are 
evils, and the root of all evil, with the pro- 
duction of which no form of government has 
anything to do, and against which every form 
of government will be in vain invoked to 
contend. 
In conclusion, we must bear in mind that 



56 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

democracy or social self-government is the 
most difficult of all human problems, and 
must be approached, not with inflated hopes 
and rosy imaginations, but with sobriety and 
caution and a sound mind, and at critical 
moments not without prayer and fasting. 
Before entering on any scheme for rebuilding 
our social edifice on a democratic model, we 
should consider seriously what a democracy 
really implies, and what we may reasonably 
promise ourselves from its possible success. 
Of the two rallying cries which have made it 
a favorite with persons given to change, equal- 
ity and liberty, the one is no more true than 
that all the mountains in the Highlands are as 
high as Ben ISTevis, and can only mean at the 
best that all men have an equal right to be called 
men and to be treated as men, while the other 
is only true so far as concerns the removal of 
all artificial barriers to the free exercise of 
each man' s function, according to his capacity 
and opportunities. But this is a mere starting- 
point in the social life of a great people. When 
the bird is out of the cage, which it must be in 
order to be a perfect bird, the more serious 



THE STATE. 57 

question emerges, what use it shall make of 
its newly -acquired liberty. Here certainly to 
men, as to birds, there are great dangers to be 
faced ; and with nations the progress of society, 
as already remarked, is measured to a much 
larger extent by the increase of limitations 
than by the extension of liberties. Then, 
again, the fundamental postulate of extreme 
democracy that the majority have everywhere 
a right to govern is manifestly false. ISTo man 
as a member of society has a natural right to 
govern : he has a right to be governed, and 
well governed ; and that can only be when the 
government is conducted by the wisest and 
best men who compose the society. If the 
numerical majority is composed of sober- 
minded, sensible, and intelligent persons who 
will either govern wisely themselves or choose 
persons who will do so, then democracy is 
Justified by its deeds ; but if it is otherwise, 
and if, when an appeal is made to the multi- 
tude, they will choose the most daring, the 
most ambitious, and the most unscrupulous, 
rather than the most sensible, the most mod- 
erate, and the most conscientious, then democ- 



58 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

racy is a bad thing, at least notMng better 
than the other ocracies which it supplants. It 
is manifest, therefore, that of all forms of gov- 
ernment democracy is that which imperatively 
requires the greatest amount of intelligence 
and moderation among the great mass of the 
people, especially among the lower classes, 
who have always been the most numerous ; 
and, as history can point to no quarter of the 
world where such a happy condition of the 
numerical intelligence has been realized, it 
cannot look with any favor on schemes of uni- 
versal suffrage, even when qualified with a 
stout array of effective checks. The system, 
indeed, of representing every man individually, 
and giving every member of a society a capi- 
tation vote, as they have a capitation tax in 
Turkey, however popular with the advocates 
of extreme democracy, seems quite unreasona- 
ble. What requires to be represented in a 
reasonable representative system is not so 
much individuals as qualities, capacities, in- 
terests, and types. Every class should be 
represented, rather than every man in a class. 
Besides, the equality of votes which democracy 



THE STATE. 59 

demands, on the principle that I am as good 
as you and perhaps a little better, is utterly- 
false, and tends to nourish conceit and imper- 
tinence, to banish all reverence, and to ignore 
all distinctions in society. Anyhow, there 
can be no doubt that great masses of men 
acting together on exciting occasions are 
peculiarly liable to hasty resolutions and vio- 
lent opinions ; all democracies, therefore, are 
unsafe which are unprovided with checks in 
the form of an upper chamber composed of 
more cool materials, and planted firmly in a 
position that makes them independent of the 
fever and faction of the hour. A strong de- 
mocracy stands as much in need of an aristo- 
cratic rein as a strong aristocracy does of a 
democratic spur. And let it never be forgot- 
ten — what democracies are far too apt to for- 
get — that minorities have rights as well as 
majorities ; nay, that one of the great ends to 
be achieved by a good government is to pro- 
tect the few against the natural insolence of a 
majority glorying in its numbers, and hur- 
ried on by the spring- tide of a popular con- 
tagion. A state of society is not at all incon- 



60 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

ceivable in wMch the many shall make all the 
laws and monopolize all the offices of a fussy 
bureaucracy, while the few are burdened with 
all the taxes. Never too frequently can we 
repeat, in reference to all public acts, no less 
than to the conduct of individuals in private 
life, the great Aristotelian maxim that all 
EXTEEMES ARE WROisG ; that every force when 
in full action tends to an excess which for its 
own salvation must be met by a counterpois- 
ing force ; that all good government, as all 
healthy existence, is the balance of opposites 
and the marriage of contraries ; and that the 
more mettlesome the charger the more need of 
a firm rein and a cautious rider. He who 
overlooks this prime postulate of all sane 
action in this complex world may pile his 
democratic house tier above tier and enjoy his 
green conceit for a season ; but the day of 
sore trial and civic storm is not far, when the 
rain shall descend, and the floods come, and 
the winds blow and beat upon that house, and 
it will fall, because it was founded upon a 
dream. 



THE CHURCH, 



E 



THE CHURCH. 

Ov Ttai 6 key GOV fioi Kvpte, KvpiEy eidsXevderai si? 
TTjv fia6i\.Eiav rwv ovpavwv • aAA.' 6 itoi(Sv to BeXr/fxa 
rov Ttarpoi juov rov ev roz? ovpavoi<S. — 'O 'S£1THP. 

Ma]^ is cliaracteristically a religious animal ; 
in fact, as Socrates teaches, the only religious 
animal ;^ for, though a dog has no doubt rever- 
ential emotions, it cannot be said with any 
propriety that he has religious ideas or ecclesi- 
astical institutions, for a very good reason, 
because he has no ideas at all : observation he 
has very keen, and memory also wonderfully 
retentive ; instincts also, like all primal vital 
forces, divine and miraculous; but ideas cer- 
tainly none, for ideas mean knowledge ; and 
brutes that have no language properly so called, 

1 rivoi ydp aXXov Z,c^ov if'vx'f) Ttpc^ra /uer Bewv rcSv 
TO. fxeyidra ytai ycaXXidra dwra^avrcov peSr/rai on 
sidi : ride cpvXoy aXXo rj avBpaoTtoi Qeovi Bepaitevovdi, 
— Xen. Mem, i. 4. 



64 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

that is a system of significant vocal signs ex- 
pressive of ideas, but only cries, gesticula- 
tions, and visible or audible signs expressive 
of sensations and feelings, can by no law of 
natural analogy be credited with, the posses- 
sion of a faculty of which they give no mani- 
festation. Language is the outward body and 
form of which thought and reason and knowl- 
edge and ideas are the inward soul and force ; 
and hence the wise Greeks, unlike our modern 
scientists, who delight in confounding man 
with the monkey, expressed language and rea- 
son with one word Xoyoi, while what we dig- 
nify with the name of language in birds and 
other animals was simply (poovr}, or significant 
voice. If, therefore, there is any thing most 
human that history has to teach, it must be 
about religion. All the great nations whose 
names mark the march of human fates have 
been religious nations. A people without 
religion does not exist, or, if it does exist, it 
exists only as an abnormal and deficient speci- 
men of the genus to which it belongs, which 
is of no more account in the just estimate of 
the type than a fox without a tail, or a lawyer 



THE CHURCH. 65 

without a tongue ; and as for individual atlie- 
ists, who have been talked about in ancient 
times, and specially in these latter days, they 
are either philosophers like Spinoza, the most 
pious of men, falsely baptized with an odious 
title from the stupidity, prejudice, or malice 
of the community, or, if they really are athe- 
ists, they are monsters which a man may stare 
at as at an ass with three heads or with no head 
at all in a show. 

The form in which religion generally pre- 
sents itself in early history is what we com- 
monly call Polytheism, though it is quite 
possible — a matter about which I am not care- 
ful curiously to dogmatize — that there may 
have been in some places an original Dualism, 
like the ancient Persian, or even a Monothe- 
ism, out of which the Polytheism was devel- 
oped. For there cannot be the slightest doubt 
that, whatever may have been the starting- 
point, there lay in the popular theology a 
tendency to multiply and to reproduce itself 
in kindred but not always easily recognizable 
forms, like the children of a family or the 
cousinship of a clan. But, taking Polytheism 



66 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

as the type uiider wMcli history presents the 
objects of religious faith in the earliest times, 
we have to remark that under this common 
name, as in the case of Christianity, the great- 
est contrasts, both in speculative idea and in 
social efficiency, stare us everywhere in the 
face. In the eye of the Christian or the mono- 
theistic devotee the worships of Aphrodite and 
of Pallas Athene are equally idolatrous ; but, 
allowing that these anthropomorphic forms of 
divine forces and functions of the universe are 
equally destitute of a foundation in fact or 
reason, the reverence paid to them by a devout 
people might be as different as passion is from 
thought, and sense from spirit. As the ideal 
of wisdom in counsel and in action, the Athe- 
nian Pallas no doubt exercised as beneficent a 
sway over her Hellenic worshippers as the 
ideal of Christian womanhood, in the person 
of the "Virgin Mary, does at the present day 
over millions of Christian worshippers. It is 
only when the cosmic function impersonated 
in the polytheistic god, being of an inferior 
order, leaps from its proper position of subor- 
dination and usurps the controlling and regu- 



THE CHURCH. 67 

la ting action belonging to the superior function, 
that polytheistic idolatry becomes iminoral ; 
though, of course, the very facility of this 
usurpation, and the stamp of a pseudo divinity 
that may thereby be given to beastly vice, is a 
sufficient reason for the denunciations of the 
heathen idolatries so frequent in the Old Testa- 
ment, which ultimately ripened into the spirit- 
ual apostleship and monotheistic aggression of 
St. Paul. One other striking feature of all 
polytheistic religions may not be omitted. 
They are naturally complete — more catholic, 
more sympathetic with universal nature and 
universal life than monotheistic religions ; if 
they make a philosophical mistake in wor- 
shipping many gods, they do not make a moral 
mistake in excluding any of his attributes. 
With the polytheistic worshipper everything 
is sacred : the sun and the sea and the sky, 
dark earth and awful night, excite in him an 
emotion of reverence. If the Greek polytheist 
was devout at all, he was devout everywhere ; 
whereas, under monotheistic influences, there 
is a danger that devout feelings may respond 
exclusively to the stern decrees of an absolute 



68 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

lawgiver and the awful threatenings of a vio- 
lated law. Polytheistic piety, whatever its 
defects, was always ready to add a grace to 
every innocent enjoyment ; monotheistic relig- 
iousness, as we see its severe features in some 
modern churches, contents itself with adding 
a solemn sanction to the moral law — a severity 
which here and there has not been able to keep 
itself free from the unlovely phase of regard- 
ing the innocent enjoyments and the graceful 
pleasantries of life as a sin. 

So much for the soul of the business ; the 
body is what we call the Church. And here 
the very word is significant. In one sense, as 
a separate ethical corporation, the ancients 
had no Church. Why ? Because Church and 
State were one ; or, if they were two, they 
were two like the famous Siamese twins that 
used to be carried about the country as a show, 
two so closely connected that they could no 
more be torn from one another and live than 
the limpet can be separated from the rock to 
which it clings. With the peoples of the an- 
cient world the State was the Church and the 
Church was the State ; the priest was a 



THE CHURCH. 69 

magistrate and tlie magistrate was a priest. 
This identity of two things, or loose intercom- 
munion and fusion of two things in modern 
association so instinctively kept apart, arose 
from the common germ out of which both 
Church and State grew — viz., as we saw in the 
previous lecture, the Family. Every father 
of a family, in the normal and healthy state of 
society, is his own priest as well as his own 
king. In religion and morals, as well as in all 
domestic ordinances, he is absolute and su- 
preme ; and the functions which necessarily 
belonged to him as supreme administrator in 
his own family would, under the influence of 
family feelings, naturally be conceded to him 
when the family grew to a clan, and the clan 
to a kingdom. And this is the state of things 
which we meet with in the Book of Genesis, 
long before the promulgation of the Mosaic 
law, where we read (xiv. 18) that Melchizedek, 
Mng of Salem, went out to bless Abraham, and 
he was priest of the Most High God ; the dis- 
tinction between priest and layman, to which 
our ears are so familiar, being in this, as in 
a thousand other well-known instances, alto- 



70 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

gether ignored. Not only in Homer, where we 
find Agamemnon, the king of men, performing 
sacrificial functions without even the presence 
of a priest,^ but in the sober historical age we 
find the King of Sparta performing all the 
public sacrifices — being, in fact, in virtue of 
his office, high priest of Jove.^ So closely in- 
deed was the State religion identified with the 
person of the supreme magistrate that, when 
the kingship was abolished in G-reece, and 
three principal archons and seven secondary 
ones shared his functions, one still retained 
the title of ftadiXevi, Mng^ and had the super- 
vision, or, as we would say, supreme epis- 
copacy and overseership of all matters per- 
taining to religion.^ The same thing took 
place in Home, where the name of king was 
even more odious than in Greece ; but never- 
theless a rex sacrificulus, or Mng-sacrificer^ 
with his regina or queen^ took rank in all the 
public pontifical dinners above the pontifex 
maximus himself. The college of pontiffs in 

1 Iliad, iii. 271 ; and compare Virgil, ^neid, in. 80. 

2 Xen., Rep. Lac, i. 15 ; Herod, vi. 56. 

3 Pollux, viil. 90. 



THE CHURCH. 71 

Rome, which had the supreme direction of all 
religious matters, was not a board of priests, 
but of laymen — or at least of laymen who, 
without any qualification but some inaugurat- 
ing ceremony, might be assumed into the 
pontifical college ; whence the title of pontifex 
maximus, which the emperors assumed, was 
no more of the nature of a usurpation than the 
title of imperator^ which belonged to them as 
supreme commanders of the army. Who, then, 
were the priests, and what need of them at all 
if the laity might legally perform all their 
functions? The answer is simple. Both in 
Greece and Rome there were priests and 
priestly families, as the Eumolpidce in Eleusis, 
specially dedicated to the service of certain 
local gods ; but there was no order, class, or 
body of persons having the exclusive right to 
oflaciate in sacred matters over the whole com- 
munity. No doubt the social position of priests 
in democratic Greece and monarchical Egypt 
was extremely different, but in one respect - 
they were identical : in Athens Church and 
State were one as much as in Memphis. In 
Egypt there was a remarkably strong body or 



73 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

clan of priests enjoying the highest dignities 
and immunities ; but there is no proof that 
they were a caste, in the strict sense of the 
word ; and their virtues were so far from be- 
ing incommunicable that, when the Pharaoh 
did not happen to be a born priest, but of the 
military class, he was obliged to be made a 
priest before he could be a king ; and when 
once king he became ipso facto the high 
priest of the nation, and took precedence of 
all priests in all great public acts of religious 
ceremonial. It must not be supposed, how- 
ever, that, though he was supreme in all 
sacred matters and the actual head of the 
Church, to use our language, he could set 
himself, like our Henry VIII., to carve creeds 
for the people, and imprison or burn devout 
persons for refusing to acknowledge his arbi- 
trary decrees. The exercise of sacred func- 
tions in the hands of the masterful Tudor and 
his Machiavelian minister was a usurpation 
tolerated by a loyal people as their readiest 
and most eflFective way of getting rid of the 
masterdom of the Eoman Pope, which in 
those days pressed like an incubus on the 



THE CHURCH. 73 

European conscience ; it was invoking one 
devil to turn out another, and was successful, 
as such operations are wont to be, in a blun- 
dering sort of way. But the worshipful 
" Sons of the Sun" — for so they were betitled 
— on the banks of the sweet-watered Mle, had 
no monstrous pretension of this kind, and 
could not even have dreamt of it. They did 
not sit on the throne to reform religion, but to 
maintain it. Neither in Egypt nor in Greece 
in those days was any such thing known as 
the rights of the individual conscience ; but 
both kings and people received religious laws 
and consuetudes as we do Magna CTiarta ; 
reasonable people, in the long course of the 
centuries before Christ, would no more dream 
of disturbing the ancestral belief about the 
gods than they would think of influencing 
the settled courses of the stars. It was their 
very deep-rooted permanency, in the midst of 
the startling mutabilities to which human 
affairs are liable, that made the fundamental 
truths of religion so valuable to their souls ; 
and as to the particular forms under which 
these fundamental truths might have been 



74 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

symbolized by venerable tradition, the people 
were not given to form themselves into hostile 
camps on the ground of any local difference, 
as we do in Scotland about ecclesiastical con- 
ceits and crotchets ; and every devout Egyp- 
tian allowed his neighbor without offence to 
pay sacred honors to a crocodile or a cat, con- 
vinced that these honors were equally legiti- 
mate and equally beneficial whenever the 
sacred symbolism peculiar to the worship was 
wisely understood. Collisions, therefore, be- 
tween Church and State, or between priest- 
hood and kingship, such as signalized the 
medieval struggles of the Popes and Em- 
perors, and the convulsions of our infant 
Protestant freedom in England, could not 
take place among the ancient polytheists. 
A wise Socrates was equally willing with the 
most superstitious devotee, when pious grati- 
tude called, to sacrifice a cock to ^^sculapius ; 
and the v6f-iw TtoXsGoi, by the custom of the 
State, was the direction which he gave to all 
who inquired of him by what rites they ought 
to worship the gods.^ Only among the He- 

1 Xen., Mem. i. 3. 



THE CHURCH. 75 

brews, as a people in whose religious habitude 
polytheistic and monotheistic tendencies had 
never come to any decisive settlement of their 
inherent antagonism, do I find a record of a 
very serious collision between Church and 
State, after the fashion of our German Henries 
and Transalpine Hildebrands in the days of 
Papal aggression. Scotsmen familiar with 
their Bibles will easily see that I allude to 
the case of Uzziah, as recorded in 2 Chron. 
xxvi. 16-20 : — ^'But when he was strong, his 
heart was lifted up to his destruction : for he 
transgressed against the Lord his God, and 
went into the temple of the Lord to burn 
incense upon the altar of incense. And Azariah 
the priest went in after him, and with him 
fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant 
men : And they withstood Uzziah the king, 
and said unto him. It appertaineth not unto 
thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, 
but to the priests the sons of Aaron, that are 
consecrated to burn incense : go out of the 
sanctuary ; for thou hast trespassed ; neither 
shall it be for thine honor from the Lord God. 
Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in 



76 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

his hand to burn incense : and while he was 
wroth with the priests, the leprosy even rose 
up in his forehead before the priests in the 
house of the Lord, from beside the incense 
altar. And Azariah the chief priest, and all 
the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he 
was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust 
him out from thence ; yea, himself hasted also 
to go out, because the Lord had smitten him." 
So much for Polytheism. That it should 
have served the spiritual needs of the human 
heart so long — five thousand years at least, 
from the first Pharaoh that looked down from 
his Memphian pyramid on the mystic form of 
the Sphinx, to the last Roman Emperor that 
sacrificed white bulls from Clitumnus at the 
altar of the Capitoline Jove — is proof sufficient 
that, with all its faults, it was made of very 
serviceable stuff ; but creeds and kingdoms, 
like individuals, must die. At the commence- 
ment of the eighth century of the Roman Re- 
public heathenism was doomed in all Roman- 
ized Europe, in all JS^orthern Africa, and in 
Western Asia, and that for four reasons. The 
polytheistic religions of the Old World, ere- 



THE CHURCH. 77 

ated as they were in the infancy of society, no 
doubt under the guidance of a healthy instinct 
of dex:)endence on the ruling power of the 
universe, but in the main inspired by the 
emotions and formulated by the imagination, 
without the regulating control of reason, could 
not hope to hold their ground permanently in 
the face of that rich growth of individual 
speculation which, from the sixth century 
before Christ, spread with such ample ramifi- 
cation from Asiatic and European Greece over 
the greater part of the civilized world. If it 
was a necessity of human beings at all times 
to have a religion, it was a no less urgent 
problem, as the range of vision enlarged with 
the process of the ages, to harmonize their 
theology with their thinking. And if, on the 
intellectual side, the polytheistic religions of 
that cultivated age were threatened with a 
collapse, the sensuous element, always strongly 
represented in emotional faiths, was in con- 
stant danger of being dragged down into a 
disturbing and degrading sensuality. Then, 
again, when the Roman Republic, in the age 
of Augustus Csesar, had completed the range 



78 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

of its^ world-wide conqnests, two social forces, 
nnknown in the best ages of Greece and E-ome, 
viz., wealth and luxury, added their perilous 
momentum to the corrupting elements which 
were already at work in the bosom of the 
polytheistic system. And in what a hot-bed 
of fermenting putridity these evil leavens had 
resulted at this period, the pages of Suetonius 
and many chapters in St. Paul are witnesses 
equally credible and equally tragic. Add to 
all this the fact that the motley intermixture 
of ideas and the inorganic confusion and 
forced assimilation of creeds which accom- 
panied the universal march of Roman pol- 
ity brought about a vague desire for some 
sort of religious unity which might run paral- 
lel with the political unity under which men 
lived ; and this desire could be gratified only 
by placing in the foreground the great truth 
of the unity of the Supreme Being, which to 
vindicate in pre-Christian ages had been the 
special mission of the Hebrew race, and which 
the Greeks themselves had not indistinctly 
indicated by placing the moral government of 
the world and the issues of peace and war in 



THE CHURCH. 79 

the hands of an omnipotent, all- wise, all-benef- 
icent, and absolute Jove. These and the like 
considerations will lead the thoughtful student 
of history easily to understand how the ap- 
pearance of such an extraordinary moral force 
as Christianity was imperatively called for at 
the period when our Saviour, with His divine 
mission to a fallen race, began His preaching 
on the shores of a lonely Galilean lake ; and 
the most superficial glance at the contents of 
His preaching, as contrasted with the heathen- 
ism which it replaced, will show how wonder- 
ful was the new start which it gave to the 
moral life of the world, and how effective the 
spur which it applied to the march of the ages 
— a spur so potent that we may, without the 
slightest exaggeration, say that to Christian- 
ity we owe almost exclusively whatever mild 
agencies tempered the harshness and sweet- 
ened the sourness of crude government in the 
Middle Ages ; and no less, whatever hopeful 
elements are at the present moment working 
among ourselves to save the British people, at 
a critical stage of their social development, 
from the decadence and the degradation that 



80 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

overtook the Romans after their great military 
mission had been fulfilled. Let us look artic- 
ulately at the main constituents of that new 
leaven wherewith Christianity was equipped 
to regenerate the world. These I find to be — 

(1.) By asserting in the strongest way the 
unity of God, it at once cut the root of the 
tendency in human nature to create arbitrary 
objects of worship according to the lust or 
fancy of the worshipper, and accustomed the 
popular intelligence to a harmonized view of 
the various forces at work in the constitution 
of a world so various and so complex as to a 
superficial view readily to appear contradictory 
and irreconcilable. 

(2.) By preaching the unity of God, not as 
an abstract metaphysical idea, but as what it 
really is, a divine fatherhood, Christianity at 
one stroke bound all men together as brethren 
and members of a common family ; and in this 
way, while in the relation of nation to nation 
it substituted apostleships of love for wars of 
subjugation, in the relation of class to class it 
established a sort of spiritual democracy, in 
which the implied equality of all men as men 



THE CHURCH. 81 

gradually led to the abolition of the abnormal 
institution of slavery, on which all ancient 
society rested. 

(3.) Christianity, by starting religion as an 
independent moral association altogether sepa- 
rate from the State, at once purified the sphere 
of the Church from corrupting elements, and 
confined the State within those bounds which 
the nature of a civic administration furnishes. 
Keligion in this way was purified and elevated, 
because in its nicely segregated sphere no 
secular considerations of any kind could inter- 
fere to tone down its ideal, direct its current, 
or lame its efiiciency ; while the State, on the 
other hand, was saved from the folly of inter- 
meddling with matters which it did not under- 
stand, and professing principles which it did 
not believe. 

(4.) Christianity, by planting itself emphati- 
cally at the very first start, as one may see in 
the Sermon on the Mount, in direct antagonism 
to ritualism, ceremonialism, and every variety 
of externalism, and placing the essence of all 
true religion in regeneration, or, as St. Paul 
has it, a new creature — i. e. the legitimate 



8S WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

practical dominance of the spiritual and ethi- 
cal above the sensual and carnal part of our 
nature — broke down the middle wall of parti- 
tion which had so often divided piety from 
morality ; so that now a man of culture might 
consistently give his right hand to religion and 
his left hand to philosophy, an attitude which, 
so long as Homer was all that the Greeks had 
for a bible, no devout Hellenist could assume. 

(5.) By placing a firm belief in a future life 
as a guiding prospect in the foreground, the 
religion of Christ gave the highest possible 
value to human life, and the strongest possible 
spur to perseverance in a virtuous career. 

(6.) By appealing directly to the individual 
conscience, and making religion a matter of 
personal concern and of moral conviction, it 
raised the value of each individual as a respon- 
sible moral agent, and placed the dignity of 
every man as a social monad on the firmest 
possible pedestal. 

(7.) By making love its chief motive power, 
it supplied both the steam and the oil of the 
social machine with a continuity of moral force 
never dreamt of in any of the ancient societies 



THE CHURCH. 83 

— a force which no mere socialistic schemes for 
organizing labor, no boards of health, no politi- 
cal economy, no mathematical abstractions, 
no curiosities of physical science, no demo- 
cratic suffrages, and no school inspectorships, 
though multiplied a thousand times, apart from 
this divine agency, can ever hope to achieve. 

Thus equipped with a moral armature such 
as the world had never yet seen, it might have 
been expected that the triumph of Christianity 
over the ruins of heathenism would have been 
as complete and as pure from all admixture of 
evil as it appears in the great evangelical 
manifesto commonly called the Sermon on the 
Mount. But it was not to be so ; nor, indeed, 
created as human nature is, could possibly be. 
The miraculous virtue of the seed could not 
change the nature of the soil, and the sweet 
new wine put into old bottles could not fail to 
catch a taint from the acid incrustations of the 
original liquor. Corruptia optimi pessima is 
the great lesson which history everywhere 
teaches, and nowhere with a more tragic im- 
pressiveness than in the history of the Chris- 
tian Church. What a rank crop of old wives' 



84 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

fables, endless genealogies, ceremonial observ- 
ances, worship of the letter, voluntary humili- 
ties, and disputations of science, falsely so 
called, started into fretful array before the 
spiritual swordsmanship of St. Paul, no reader 
of the grandest correspondence in the world 
need be told ; but it was not so mnch from 
Jewish drivel, Attic subtlety, or Corinthian 
sensualism, that the corrupting forces were to 
proceed which in the post-Apostolic age in- 
sinuated themselves like a poison into the pure 
blood of the Church. It is from within that, 
in moral matters, our great danger flows : if 
the kingdom of heaven is there, the kingdom 
of hell is there no less distinctly. The doctrine 
of Aristotle, and the teaching of history that 
ALL EXTREMES ARE WRONG, is ever and ever 
repeated to passion-spurred mortals, and ever 
and ever forgotten. In the green ardor of our 
worship we make an idol of our virtue ; the 
strong lines of the particular excellence which 
we admire are stretched into a caricature ; our 
sublime, severed from all root of soundness, 
reels over into the ridiculous ; we revel and 
riot and get into an intoxicated excitement 



THE CHURCH. 85 

with the fruit of our own fancy ; and work 
ourselves from one stage of inflammation to 
another, till, as our great dramatist says, 

" Goodness, grown to a pleurisy, 
Dies of its own too much." 

The excess into which Christianity at its first 
start most naturally fell was ultra-spiritualism, 
asceticism, or by whatever name we may 
choose to characterize that high-flying system 
in morals which, not content with the regula- 
tion and subordination, aims at the violent 
subjugation and, as much as may be, the total 
suppression of the physical element in man. 
How near this abuse lay is evident, not only 
from the general tendency of every man to 
make an idol of his distinctive virtue, and of 
every sect to delight in the exaggeration of its 
most characteristic feature, but there are not a 
few passages of the K"ew Testament which 
plainly show that the masculine Christianity 
of St. Paul had not more occasion to protest 
against those Greek libertines who turned the 
grace of God into licentiousness, than against 
those offshoots of the Jewish Essenes who pro- 
fessed a self-imposed arbitrary religiosity (Col. 



86 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

ii. 18, 23), even forbidding to marry and com- 
manding to abstain from meats (1 Tim. iv. 8).^ 
There is indeed, something very sednctive in 
these attempts to acquire a superhuman virtue, 
whether they be made by a poet casting off 
the vulgar bonds that bind him to his fellows, 
like Percy Bysshe Shelley, that he may feed 
upon sun-dews and get drunk on transcen- 
dental imaginations, or by a religious person, 
that he may devote himself to spiritual exer- 
cises, free from the disturbing influence of 
earthly passions. Such a renunciation of the 
flesh gratifies his pride, and has, in fact, the 
aspect of a heroic virtue in a special line ; 
while, at the same time, it is with some persons 
more convenient, inasmuch as when the reso- 
lution is once formed and a decided start 
made, it is always easier to abstain than to be 
moderate. Nevertheless, all such ambitious 
schemes to ignore the body and to cut short 
the natural rights of our physical nature must 

^ From the didaxv t^^v aTtodroXcoVf or Early Teaching 
of the Apostles, lately discovered, ch . viii. , we learn that it was 
the custom of the early Christians to observe two days of fasting 
in the week— Wednesday and Friday. — Edit. Oxford Parker, 1885. 



THE CHURCH. 87 

fail. It never can be the virtue of a man to 
wisli to be more than man ; and every religion 
which sets a stamp of special approval on 
superhuman, and therefore unhuman, virtue, 
erects a wall of separation between the gospel 
which it preaches and the world which it 
should convert. In fact, it rather gives up the 
world in despair, and institutes an artiiicial 
school for the practice of certain select virtues, 
which only a few will practice, and which, 
when practiced, can only miake those few unfit 
for the social position which Providence 
meant them to occupy. 

The second excess into which Christianity, 
under the action of frail human nature, easily 
ran was intolerance. This intolerance, as in 
the previous case, is only a virtue run to seed ; 
for, as all asceticism is merely a misapplica- 
tion or an exaggeration of the virtue of self- 
denial and self-control, so all intolerance, or 
defect of kindly regard to the contrary in 
opinion or conduct, is merely a crude or an 
impolitic extension of the imperative ought 
which lies at the root of all moral truth, and 
specially of all monotheistic religions. There 



88 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

is, indeed, a certain intolerance in trutli which, 
will not allow it to hold parley with error ; 
and every new religion with a lofty inspira- 
tion, conscious of a divine mission, is neces- 
sarily aggressive : it delights to pluck the 
beard of ancestral authority, and marches 
right into the presence of hoary absurdity and 
consecrated stupidity. No doubt there is a 
boundary here which the divine wisdom of 
the Son of God pointed at emphatically enough 
when he was asked to bring down fire from 
heaven on those who taught or did otherwise ; 
but the evil spirit of self-importance which 
prompted this request was too deeply en- 
grained in human nature to be eradicated by a 
single warning of the great teacher. This 
spirit of arrogant individualism asserted itself 
at an early period in the disorderly Corinthian 
Church very much in the same way as it does 
among ourselves, specially in Scotland, at 
the present moment — viz. by the multiplica- 
tion of sects, the exaggeration of petty distinc- 
tions, and the fomenting of petty rivalries, — 
^' Now this I say, that every one of you saith, 
I am of Paul ; and I of ApoUos ; and I of Ce- 



THE CHURCH. 89 

phas; and I of Christ" (1 Cor. i. 12),— a spirit 
which the apostle most strongly denounces as 
proceeding manifestly from the overrated 
importance of some secondary specialty, or 
some accessory condition, of the body of be- 
lievers, who thus clnbbed themselves into a 
denomination, and resulting in an unkindly 
divergence from the common highway of evan- 
gelic life, and an intolerant desire to over- 
ride one Christian brother with the private 
shibboleth of another, and to stamp him with 
the seal of their own conceit. The field in 
which this intolerant spirit displayed itself 
was of course different, according to the in- 
fluences at work at the time ; but there is one 
field which, if church history is to teach us 
anything, we are bound to emphasize strongly, 
that is the field of dogma ; for, if there be any 
influence that has worked more powerfully to 
discredit Christianity than even the immoral 
lives and selfish maxims of professing Chris- 
tians, it is the fixation and glorification and 
idol- worship of the dogma. No doubt Chris- 
tianity is far from being that system, or rather 
no system, of vague and cloudy sentiment to 



90 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

which, some persons would reduce it : it has 
bones, and a firm framework ; it stands upon 
facts, and is not without doctrines, but it does 
not make a parade of doctrines ; and the faith 
which it enjoins, as is manifest from the defi- 
nition and historical examples in Hebrews xi. , 
is not an intellectual faith in the doctrines of 
a metaphysical theology, but a living faith in 
the moral goyernment of the world and a 
heroic conduct in life, as the necessary ex- 
pression of such faith. The mere intellectual 
orthodoxy on which the Christian Church has, 
by the tradition of centuries, placed such a 
high value, is, in the apostolical estimate, 
plainly worth nothing ; for the devils also be- 
lieve and tremble, as St. James has it, or as our 
Lord himself said in the striking summation 
to the Sermon on the Mount, '' Not they who 
call me Lord^ Lord^ shall enter into the king- 
dom, but they who do the will of my Father 
who is in heaven. By their works, not by 
their creed, ye shall know them."^ Never- 

^ In the didaxv T^^y (XTtodroXGor there is absolutely no 
dogma. It is all practice, end this is quite in harmony with the 
use of didaxjj by St. Paul (1 Tim. i. 10), and indeed with the 
whole tone of these two admirable epistles. 



THE CHURCH. 91 

theless, the exaltation of the dogma has always 
been a favorite tendency of the Church, and 
the besetting sin of the clergy. With the 
mass of the people, to swear to a cnrious 
creed is always more easy than to lead a noble 
life ; while to the clerical intellect it must 
always give a secret satisfaction to think that 
the science of theology, which is the furthest 
removed from the handling of the great mass 
of men, has in their hands assumed a well-de- 
fined shape, of whicli the articulations are as 
subtle and as necessary as the steps of solu- 
tion in a difficult algebraic problem. The late 
Baron Bunsen, for many years Prussian am- 
bassador in London, one of the most large- 
minded and large-hearted of Christian men, in 
the preface to his great Bibel werlc^ devotes a 
special chapter to Dogmatism as a vice of the 
clerical mind leading to false views of Script- 
ure ; over and above what he calls the modern 
revival of scholastic theology in Germany, he 
enumerates four dominant epochs of ecclesias- 
tical life in which this anti-evangelical ten- 
dency has prominently asserted itself. These 
are — (1) the dogmatism of the great Church 



93 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

councils in tlie reigns of Constantine, Theodo- 
sius, and Justinian ; (2) tlie medieval scholas- 
ticism of the Western Churcli ; (3) the Protes- 
tant scholasticism of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries ; (4) the dogmatism of the 
Jesuits, Perron, Bossuet, and others. Had 
this dogmatic tendency of the Church content- 
ed itself with tabulating a curious scheme of 
divine mysteries, though it might justly have 
been deemed impertinent, and here and there 
a little presumptuous, yet it might have been 
condoned lightly as a sort of clerical recrea- 
tion in hours which might have been worse 
employed ; but it could not be content with 
this : it passed at once into action, and in this 
guise prevailed to deface the fair front of the 
Church with gashes of more bloody and bar- 
barous inhumanity than ever marked the altars 
of the Baals and Molochs of the most savage 
heathen superstitions. 

Another monstrous abuse born out of the 
bosom of the Church, though not so directly, 
is Sacerdotalism. I say not so directly, be- 
cause the genius of Christianity is so distinctly 
negative of all priesthood that, had there been 



THE CHURCH. 93 

even an express proMbition of it, its contra- 
diction to the whole tone of the New Testa- 
ment could not have been more apparent, 
l^ot more certainly are the sacrifices of the 
Jewish law abolished in the sacrifice of Christ, 
according to the Pauline theology, than the 
Levitical priesthood stands abolished in the 
priesthood of Christ and in the priesthood of 
the individual members of his spiritual body 
(2 Peter v. 9).^ Whence, then, came our 
Christian priesthood ? Partly, I suspect, as 
the Jewish Sabbath was interpolated into the 
Christian Lord's Bay, from the nearness and 
external similitude of the two things — the 
presbyter being to the outward eye pretty 
much the same as the priest was to the Jewish 
worshippers ; partly from the self-importance 
which is the besetting sin of all bodies of men 
prominently planted in the social platform, 
and which induces them to magnify their 
vocation, and in doing so stilt their profes- 

1 In the 8idax^ rwv dTtodroXoov, c, xm.,the "■ prophets'''' axe 
said to be to Christians what the " high priests'''' were to the 
Jews,— a phraseology which could not possibly have been used 
had any priesthood, in the Hebrew sense, existed in the early 
Church. 



94 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

sional pride up into the attitude of a very 
stately and a very reputable virtue. Tlie 
proper functions of the ofl&ce-bearers of the 
early Christian Church, call them overseers, 
bishops, or what you will, were so honorable 
and so beneficent that, especially with an un- 
learned and unthinking people, the reverential 
respect due to the actors might easily pass 
into a superstitious belief in the mystical 
virtue of the operations of which they were 
the conductors ; and this ready submission on 
the part of the people, holding out a willing 
hand to the natural self-importance and po- 
tentiated self-estimate of the clerical body, 
resulted in a four-square system of sacerdotal 
control, sacerdotal virtue, and sacerdotal in- 
fluence, to which we shall search for a parallel 
in vain through all the annals of Asiatic and 
African heathenism. Nay, I can readily be- 
lieve that those who can find a priesthood in 
the genius of the gospel and the apostolic in- 
stitution of the Christian Church, will natu- 
rally be inclined to maintain that the superior 
power of the Gregories, Bonifaces, and Inno- 
cents of the medieval Church, as contrasted 



THE CHURCH. 95 

with anything that we read or know of the 
Egyptian, Hebrew, and Roman pontiffs, is the 
natural and necessary outcome of the superior 
excellence of the Christian religion ; and this, 
no doubt, is the only comfortable belief on 
which all forms of Christian sacerdotalism can 
repose. 

So much for the corruptions of the Christian 
religion proceeding from what, in theological 
language, might be called the indwelling sin 
of the Church, unstimulated by any strong 
external seduction. But this seduction came. 
After three centuries of hardship, manfully 
endured in the school of adversity, the more 
severe trial of prosperity had to be gone 
through. The Church, which had been de- 
clared to be not of this world, and had stood 
face to face with the greatest political power 
the world ever knew in a position of sublime 
moral isolation, was now adopted by the 
State, and formed a bond of the most inti- 
mate connection with its hereditary persecu- 
tors. The starting-point of the oldest heathen 
social attitude, the identity of Church and 
State, seemed to be recalled : and a Justinian 



96 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

on the shores of the Bosphorus seemed as 
really a head of the Church as a Menes or an 
Amenophis on the banks of the Nile. But 
under the outward likeness a radical differ- 
ence lay concealed. As an essentially ethical 
society, with its own special credentials, its 
separate history, and its independent triumph, 
the Christian Church might form an alliance 
with a purely secular institution like the 
State, but it could not be absorbed or identi- 
fied with it. That alliance might be made 
beneficially in various ways and on various 
terms ; the civil magistrate might be proud to 
be called the friend and the brother of the 
Christian bishop, or he might humble himself 
to be its servant, but he never could be its 
master. The alliance therefore was, as it 
ought to be, all in favor of the spiritual body ; 
the Church gained the civil power to execute 
its decrees and to patronize its missions ; but 
a Christian State could never gain the right to 
dictate the creed or perform the functions of 
the Church. The idea that there is anything 
absolutely sinful, or necessarily pernicious, in 
the conception of an alliance between the 



THE CHURCH. 97 

Churcli and the State, is one of those hyper- 
conscientions crotchets of modern British 
sectarianism at which the Muse of history 
can only smile. There can be no greater sin 
in an Established Church than in an Estab- 
lished University or an Established Royal 
Academy. Religion and Science and Art 
have their separate and well-marked prov- 
inces, in the administration of which they 
may wisely seek for the cooperation, though 
they will always jealously avoid the dictation, 
of the State. But, though there could be no 
sin in the Church receiving the right hand of 
fellowship from the State, there might be 
danger, and that of a very serious description. 
Kothing strikes a man so much in the reading 
of the New Testament as the little respect 
which it pays to riches and the pomp and 
pride of life, and worldly honors and dignities 
of all kinds. '' How can ye hellexe who receive 
honor one from anotJter .^ " is a sentence that 
cuts very deep into the connection between the 
Church and State, which might readily mean 
the alliance of a secular institution, delighting 
in pomp and parade and glittering show, with 



98 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

a religion of which, like the philosophy of the 
porch, the most prominent feature was un- 
worldliness, humility, and spirituality. Here 
unquestionably was danger : an alliance in 
which, as in an ill- consorted marriage, the 
lower element was as likely to drag down the 
higher as the higher to lift np the lower. 
And so it actually happened. The Church 
was secularized. Alongside of the hundred 
and one monkeries of stolid asceticism and the 
hundred and one mummeries of sacerdotal 
ceremonialism, there grew up in the process 
of the ages a consolidated hierarchy of such 
concentrated, secular, and sacred potency that 
the loftiest crowned heads of Europe ducked 
beneath its shadow and quailed beneath its 
ban. To understand this, we must take note 
of the change by which the scattered presby- 
ters of the primitive Church were gradually 
massed into a strong aristocracy, which in 
due season, after the fashion of the State, 
found its key -stone in an ecclesiastical mon- 
arch. It was the wisdom of the founders of 
the Christian Church not to lay down any 
fixed norm of oflSLcial administration, but to 



THE CHUKCH. 99 

leave all tlie external machinery of a purely 
spiritual institntion free to adapt itself to tlie 
existing forms of society as time and circum- 
stance and national genius might demand. 
The form of government natural to the Church 
in its earliest stages was democratic, with 
a certain loose, ill-defined element of presi- 
dential aristocracy. But in an age which 
had bidden a long farewell both to the 
spirit and the form of democracy in civil 
administration, such a form of government 
in the Church could not hope to maintain 
itself. Under the influence of the magnifi- 
cent autocracy of Rome in its decadence, 
the simple overseer or superintendent {kTti- 
6K07to^) of a remote provincial congregation 
of believers gradually grew into a metropoli- 
tan dignitary, and culminated in the wielder of 
a secular sovereignty sitting in council with 
the most influential monarchs of Europe. The 
epiphany of an absolute monarch with a triple 
tiara on his head when contrasted with the 
simplicity and unworldliness of the primitive 
bishops wears such a strange look that it has 
been Judged, especially in Protestant countries, 



100 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

witli a more sweeping severity than it deserved. 
As a mere form of government, no man can 
give any good reason wliy the Church should 
not be governed by a monarch as well as the 
State ; the bishop of Rome, as supreme head 
of the body of bishops all over Christendom, 
and guided by them as his habitual advisers, 
was at least as natural and as reasonable a 
guide for the direction of the conscience of 
Christendom in the Middle Ages as the Coun- 
cil of Protestants who at Dort, in the year 
1618, condemned the greatest theologian and 
jurist of the day to pine in a Dutch prison, 
or the Assembly of Divines in Westminster 
who empowered the supreme magistrate to 
suppress the right of free thought in the 
breasts of all persons who were not prepared 
to set their seal to the damnatory dogmas of j 
extreme Calvinism. Nay, so far from there ' 
being anything anti- Christian or anti-social in 
the Popedom as a form of Church government, 
we may safely say that in ages of general tur- 
moil, confusion, and violence, the admitted 
supremacy of the visible head of a church 
founded on principles of peace and concilia- 



THE CHURCH. 101 

tion coiild not act otherwise tliaii beneficially. 
But wlien tlie person in wliom this moral 
supremacy was vested became the acknowl- 
edged head of a secular princedom, the case 
was altered. It was an unhappy day for the 
Christian Church, the most unhappy day per- 
haps in its whole eventful history, when Pepin, 
the ambitious minister of the last of the Mero- 
vingian kings, in the year 751, contrived to get 
out of Pope Zachary a spiritual sanction for 
his usurpation of his master' s throne. From 
that moment the Church was doomed to a 
blazing and brilliant, but a sure career of 
downfall. The spiritual abetter of a secular 
crime had to be rewarded for his pious sub- 
serviency : he received the exarchate of Ra- 
venna, and became a temporal prince. From 
that time forward the head of the Christian 
Church, who ought to have stood before the 
world as a model of all purity, truthfulness, 
peacefulness, and ethical nobility, was con- 
demned to serve two masters, God and Mam- 
mon, unworldly morality and worldly power, 
which was impossible. From this time forward 
there was not a single court intrigue in Europe, 



102 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

nor a single plot of any knot of conspirators, 
into whose counsels the snpreme bishop of the 
gospel of peace might not be dragged, or, what 
is worse, into whose lawless and nngodly 
machinations he might not be oificially thrust- 
ing himself, in order to preserve some acces- 
sory interest or gain some paltry advantage 
altogether unconnected with his spiritual func- 
tion. If there is any one element, always of 
course excepting the element of gross sensual- 
ity and absolute villainy, which more than 
another is adverse to the spirit of Evangelical 
Christianity, it is the element of court intrigue, 
political contention, and party feuds. In this 
region love, which is the life of the regenerate 
soul, cannot breathe ; truth is put under ban ; 
lies flourish; conscience is smothered; and 
low expediency everywhere takes the place of 
lofty principle. So it fared not seldom with 
the Popes; and much worse in the last de- 
gree ; for wickedness, like everything that 
lives, must live by growing, and the seed of 
secular ambition which was sown in lies, will 
grow to robbery, blossom in lust, and rij)en 
into murder. This anywhere, but specially 



THE CHURCH. lOa 

in Italy, where from the time of the patrician 
Scipio, who suppressed the elder Gracchus, 
the hot contenders for absolute power, in the 
eager pursuit of their object, have never shrank 
from the free use of the assassin's dagger and 
the poisoner's bowl. In fact, if the love of 
mere animal pleasure makes a man a beast, it 
is the love of power that translates him into a 
fiend ; and of this sort of human fiends Italian 
history presents as appalling a register as can 
be found anywhere in the annals of our race ; 
and at the top of this register stand some of 
the Popes, whose names are as prominent in 
the story of ecclesiastical Rome as those of 
Nero, Domitianus, and Heliogabalus are in the 
story of the imperial decadence. When we 
cast a rapid glance — for it deserves nothing 
more— on the revolting record of the Roman 
Popes in the age immediately preceding the 
Reformation, we hear the solemn voice of his- 
tory repeating again the maxim above quoted — 
coTTuptio optimi pessima : when priests are 
bad, they are very bad ; when the salt of the 
gospel, which was meant to preserve the moral 
life of society from putrescence, has lost its 



104 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

savor, if not cast out, it is worse than use- 
less — it becomes a poison. 

Before proceeding to the modern history of 
the Church, we ought to emphasize in a special 
paragraph the fact that one unfortunate result 
of the incorporation of the Church with the 
State was that the Church was now in a posi- 
tion to request the State to lend its potent aid 
in establishing the true doctrine of the gospel 
and suppressing all heresies. That the State 
had a right to do so no man doubted ; even in 
democratic Greece free-thinking philosophers, 
such as Anaxagoras, Diogenes, and Socrates, 
were banished or suffered death on charges of 
impiety ; and though, no doubt, political ele- 
ments, as in the case of the Arminians in Hol- 
land, worked along with the strictly religious 
feeling to set the brand of atheism on those 
men, there cannot be any doubt that where 
the State and the Church were so essentially 
one, persecutions for unauthorized religious 
observances were perfectly legitimate, as in- 
deed the memorable case of the forcible sup- 
pression of the Dionysiac mysteries, more than 
two hundred years before the earliest of the 



THE CHURCH. 105 

Christian martyrdoms in Eome, abundantly 
testifies. But there was a double horror in 
the religions persecution, after the establish- 
ment of Christianity, now inaugurated for the 
first time — the horror of a conduct so diamet- 
rically opposed to the spirit and the express 
injunction of the Founder of the Gospel, in 
whose defence it was practiced, and the horror 
also that what was now violently suppressed 
was not, as in the case of the Dionysiac mys- 
teries, rather immoral practices than erroneous 
beliefs, but simply and nakedly metaphysical 
objections against metaphysical propositions 
in theology, which, whether true or false, 
could not be made the subject of State action, 
or, in my opinion at least, of ecclesiastical cen- 
sure, without a flagrant violation of that law 
of charity which a large philosophy and a 
catholic Christianity equally enjoin. The 
banishment of Arius to Illyria, as the civil 
consequence of the formal signature of the 
Trinitarian creed by the decision of the Coun- 
cil of J^ice in the year 325, though it made no 
small noise in the world in those days, was a 
very innocent overture to the barbarous dramas 



106 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

of fire and blood that were in after ages to be 
enacted on this evil precedent. There are 
many grand places rich with historical lessons 
in London, and not a few sad ones ; but the 
saddest of all is Smithfield. I can never pace 
the stones of this memorable site, where our 
noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was dis- 
embowelled and quartered to gratify the ven- 
geance of an imperious JS'orman, without think- 
ing of the sad fate of the young and beautiful 
Anne Askew. This lady, the daughter of a 
knight of good family in Lincolnshire, under 
some of those stimulants of thought which 
were stirring up the stagnant traditions of 
medieval piety, had been led to conceive seri- 
ous doubts with regard to the Scripture author- 
ity for some of the most universally received 
doctrines of the Roman Church. This pious 
scepticism coming to the ears of certain lead- 
ing persons in Church and State, who, after 
the example of the Mcean doctors, considered 
it a sacred duty in matters pertaining to re- 
ligion to tolerate no contradiction, first brought 
this lady before the Lord Chancellor, who tore 
her limb from limb on the rack, because she 



THE CHURCH. 107 

wonld not say that she believed what she 
could not believe without denying her senses, 
and then dragged her to the blood-stained 
pavement of Smithfield, where she was girt 
with gunpowder bags and fenced with fagots, 
to be burnt to death, as if the God of Chris- 
tians were a second and enlarged edition of the 
old Moloch of Palestine. And what was her 
offence — beantiful, young, pure, and truth- 
ful woman, not more than twenty-five years 
of age — that she should be treated in this 
worse than cannibalic style in the name of 
.the gospel of Jesus Christ ? Simply that 
Henry YIII., in that style of insolent master- 
dom which he showed so royally, and conceit- 
ing himself, like a Scotch fool who came after 
him, to be a considerable theologian, assumed 
the right to put the stamp of absolute king- 
ship on the doctrine of the Church that a piece 
of bread, over which a priestly benediction 
had been pronounced by a priest, was by the 
mystical virtue of this benediction changed 
into flesh, while the fair young lady persisted 
in seeing nothing but bread. Let it be granted 
that the lady was in the wrong and the church- 



108 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

ly tradition right, it never could be right to 
tear lier flesh to shreds and to burn her bones 
to ashes because she held an opinion which, to 
say the least of it, looked as like the truth as 
its opposite. How sad, how sorrowfully sad, 
and what a commentary on what we are ever 
and anon tempted to call poor, pitiful, pride- 
ful, and presumptuous human nature, that 
Christianity had at that time been more than 
fifteen hundred years in the world, sitting in 
high places, and walking with triumphal ban- 
ners over the earth, and yet neither the princes 
of the earth nor the rulers of the Church should 
have retained even a slight echo of that reproof 
from a mild Master to a zealous disciple, to 
the effect that no man who knew the spirit of 
the divine religion which He taught, would 
ever propose to bring fire down from heaven 
or up from hell to consume the unbeliever. 

Such enormities in the doctrine and practice 
of the Church, as we have indicated rather than 
described, could lead to only one of two issues 
— Reform or Revolution. The change brought 
about, though contenting itself with the 
milder name, was in fact the more drastic pro- 



THE CHURCH. 10? 

cedure. The European reformation of Mar- 
tin Luther in 1517 was a revolution in the 
Church, much more radical and much more 
worthy of so strong a designation than the 
political revolution of 1688 in Great Britain. 
It is needless to recapitulate the causes of 
offence ; they were only too patent — insolence, 
secularity, sensuality, venality, idleness, vice, 
and worthlessness of every kind in the Church ; 
but there were two causes which, in addition 
to corruption from within, tended to open the 
ears of Christendom largely to the cry for 
Church reform. These were the stir in the 
intellectual movement from the days of the 
author of the Divine Comedy downward, en- 
forced by the invention of printing in the 
middle of the fifteenth century, which was 
amply sufficient to become a danger to even a 
much less vulnerable creed than that which 
had satisfied the crude demands of medieval 
intelligence ; and, in the second place, the hos- 
tility which the insolence and ambition of 
Churchmen had roused in the secular magis- 
tracy — that is, not only the monarch and his 
official ministers, but the great body of the 



110 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

Mgher nobility who found themselves ousted 
from their place in the familiar counsels of the 
monarch by the advocates and ambassadors of 
a foreign potentate. Thus the two best friends 
of every Established Church in its normal 
state were converted into enemies; and the 
natural indignation of the common people at 
the licentious lives and gross venality of the 
clergy was stimulated into an explosion by the 
desire of the secular dignities to curb the pride 
of the clergy, and, it might lightly happen 
also, to rob them of part of their overgrown 
wealth, nominally for the public good, really 
for the aggrandizement of the Crown and the 
nobility. The shameless nepotism of Pope 
Sixtus lY., the flagitious lives and abhorrent 
practices of the Borgias, more fit for a sensa- 
tional melodrama in the lowest Parisian theatre 
than for the home of a Christian bishop ; the 
military rage of a Julius, who turned the 
Church of Christ into a travelling camp and 
the bishop's crozier into a soldier's sword ; the 
literary dilettanteism of the Court of Leo X., 
more eager to distinguish itself by the elegant 
trimming of Latin versicles than by apostolic 



THE CHURCH. Ill 

zeal and ( hristian purity, — all this, so long as 
it disported itself on Italian ground, the aris- 
tocracy of England and Scotland might have 
continued to look on with indifference ; but 
that the son of anybody or nobody, in a 
county of unvalued clodhopi^ers, should jostle 
them in the antechamber of the monarch, and 
claim precedence in the hall of audience 
simply because he was the supple instrument 
of an insolent Italian priest, this was not to be 
borne ; and so the Reformation came, with the 
mob of the lowest classes, the mass of the re- 
spectable middle classes, the most influential 
of the nobility, and the power of the Crown, 
all in full cry against the ecclesiastical fox. 
The revolution thus volcanically effected, and 
known in history under the name of Protes- 
tantism, meant simply the right of every indi- 
vidual member of the Christian Church to take 
the principles and the practice of his Church 
directly from the original records of the 
Church, without the intervention of any body 
of authorized interpreters ; and the necessary 
product of this right when exercised was first 
to declare certain practices and doctrines that 



113 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH? 

iiad grown up in the Church through long cen- 
turies to be unauthorized departures from the 
original simplicity and purity of the gospel ; 
and, further, to deny that there existed in 
the Christian Church, as originally consti- 
tuted, any class or caste of men enjoying the 
exclusive privilege to perform sacred func- 
tions, and endowed with a divine virtue 
to perform sacramental miracles by their 
consecrating touch, — in a word, that there 
was no priesthood, properly so called, in 
the Reformed Christian Church. 'Nov is this 
doctrine, as some may think, the teaching 
only of the Helvetic confession, what certain 
persons have been fond to call extreme Protes- 
tantism ; for, though the word priest has been 
retained in the English prayer-book as a min- 
ister in sacred things of a particular grade and 
exercising a particular function, the attempt 
made by Archbishop Laud and the Romaniz- 
ing party in the Reformed Church of England 
to retain in the bosom of the Anglican Church 
the ideas which the ancient Jews and the 
Romish Christians attached to the word priest^ 
proved a signal failure ; and for the sacerdotal 



THE CHURCH. 113 

despotism which it implied, as well as for the 
secular desi3otism which the priest advised and 
encouraged the unfortunate king to assert, the 
adviser and the advised justly lost their heads. 
Of all the teachings of Church history, from 
the Waldenses in the twelfth century down to 
the present hour, there is nothing more certain 
than this, that between Popery and Protes- 
tantism there is no middle term possible. They 
may agree, in fact they do agree, in many 
essential things, and in a few accidental ; but 
in the fundamental principle of Church admin- 
istration they are diametrically opposed. The 
principle of the one is sacerdotal authority, 
absolute and unqualified ; the principle of the 
other is individual and congregational liberty. 
The one form of polity is a close oligarchy, 
the other either a free democracy or an aris- 
tocracy more or less penetrated by a demo- 
cratic spirit. 

The practical outcome of this great Protes- 
tant movement, in the midst of which we live, 
cannot fail to a reasonable eye to appear in 
the highest degree satisfactory. Never was 
the life of the Christian Church at once more 



114 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

intensely earnest and more expansively distrib- 
utive than at the present moment. On the 
one hand, the Roman Church, wisely taught 
by the experience of the past, though ob- 
stinately cleaving to that stout conserva- 
tism of doctrine and ritual inherent in the 
very bones of all sacerdotal religions, has 
been, in the main, studious to avoid those 
causes of offence from which the great rupture 
proceeded. On the other hand, the Protestant 
Churches, shaken free from the distracting 
influence of sacerdotal assumption and secular 
ambition, have found themselves in a condi- 
tion to permeate all classes of society with a 
moral virtue, of whose regenerative action 
Plato and Socrates, in their best hours, could 
not have dreamed. Some people, while gladly 
admitting the immense amount of social good 
that is done by the various sections of the 
Protestant Church, never cease to sigh for a 
lost ecclesiastical unity, and to lament the 
unseemly strifes that arise among those that 
should be possessed by one spirit and strive 
together for a common end. But the persons 
who speak thus are either sentimental weak- 



THE. CHURCH. 115 

lings, being Protestants, or are Romanists and 
sacerdotalists in their heart. Variety is the 
law of natnre in the moral no less than in the 
physical world ; and the absorption of all 
sects into one results in a stagnation which 
will never be found among moral beings, un- 
less when produced by weakness of vital force 
from within, or unnatural suppression from 
above. The two dominant types of church 
polity recognized in this country since the 
Reformation — the Episcopal and the Presby- 
terian — of which the one boasts a more aris- 
tocratic intellectual culture, and the other a 
more fervid and forcible popular action, may 
well be allowed to exist together on a mutual 
understanding of giving and taking whatever 
is best in each, and thus, in apostolic lan- 
guage, provoking one another to love and 
to good works. Competition is for the public 
benefit as much in churches as in trades. 
Dissent from any dominant body, even though 
it may proceed from the exaggerated im- 
portance given to a secondary matter, will 
always produce the good result that the 
dominant body will thereby be stirred to 



116 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

greater activity and greater watclif ulness ; so 
that, in this view, we may lay it down as one 
of the great lessons of history that the 
best form of church government is a strong 
establishment qualified by a strong dissent. 
As to the proposals which have in recent times 
been made for the formal separation of Church 
and State, they bear on their face more of a 
political than of a religious significance. Im- 
partial history offers no countenance to the 
notion that Established Churches, when well 
flanked by dissent, and in an age when the 
spiritual ruler has ceased to make the arm of 
the State the tool of intolerance, are contrary 
either to piety or to policy ; and in the desire 
so loudly expressed at election contests to lay 
violent hands on the valuable organism of 
church, agency existing in this country, the 
venerated inheritance of many ages of patriotic 
struggle, the student of history, with a chari- 
table allowance for the best motives in not a 
few, feels himself constrained to suspect in all 
such movements no small admixture of secta- 
rian jealousy, fussy religiosity, and domineer- 
ing democracy. Christianity, of course, stands 



THE CHURCH. 117 

in no need of an Established Church ; religion 
existed for three hundred years in the church 
without any State connection, and may exist 
again ; but Christianity does, above all things, 
abhor the stirring uj) of strife betwixt Church 
and Church from motives of jealousy, envy, or 
greed ; and, along with the highest philosophy 
and the most far-sighted political wisdom, 
must protest in the strongest terms against the 
abolishing of a useful ethical institution to 
gratify the insane lust of levelling in a mere 
numerical majority. 

The Church of the future, whether estab- 
lished or disestablished, or, as I think best, 
both together, provoking one another to love 
and to good works, has a great mission before 
it, if it keep sharply in view the two lessons 
which the teaching of eighteen centuries so 
eloquently enforces. Our evangelists must re- 
move from the van of their evangelic force all 
that sharp fence of metaphysical subtlety 
and scholastic dogma, which, being osten- 
tatiously paraded in creeds and catechisms, 
has given more just offence to those with- 
out than edification to those within the 



118 WHAT DOES HISTORY TEACH ? 

Clinrcli ; tlie gospel must be presented to 
the world with all that catholic breadth, kindly 
humanity, and popular directness which were 
its boast before it was laced and screwed into 
artificial shapes by the decrees of intolerant 
councils, and the subtleties of ingenious 
schoolmen. And, again, they must not allow 
the gospel to be handled, what is too often 
the case, as a mere message of hope and com- 
fort in view of a future world ; but they must 
make it walk directly into the complex rela- 
tions of modern society, and think that it has 
done nothing till the ideal of sentiment and 
conduct which it preached on Sunday has 
been more or less practiced on Monday. In 
fact, there ought to be less vague preaching 
on Sunday, and more specific and direct appli- 
cation through the week of gospel principle 
in various spheres of the intellectual and 
moral life of the community. If, in addition 
to this, our prophets of the pulpit take care 
to keep abreast of the intellectual movement 
of the age, so as not only to stir the world in 
sermons, but to guide them in the wisdom of 
daily life, they have nothing to fear from all 



THE CHURCH. llS 

the windy artillery that the speculations of a 
soulless physical science, the imaginations of 
a dreamy socialism, or the dogmatism of a cold 
philosophical formalism, can bring to bear upon 
them. Let them grapple bravely with all 
social problems, and prove whether Chris- 
tianity, which has done so much to purify the 
motives of individuals, may not be able also 
to put a more effective steam into the ma- 
chinery of society. If they shall fail here, 
they will fail gloriously, having done their 
best. It is not given to any people, however 
great, to solve all problems. When Great 
Britain shall have played out her part, 
there will be scope enough in the process of 
the ages for another stout social worker to 
place the cornice on the edifice of which she 
was privileged to raise the pillars. 



ATLANTIS: THE ANTEDILUVIAN WORLD. By Ig- 
natius DoNNNELLY. Illustrated. 12mo, Cloth, $2 00. 

Mr. Donnelly's theory is an ingenious one, and is well fortified by argu- 
ments drawn from geology and history, from prehistoric relics, from tra- 
ditions, and from manners, languages, and customs of widely separated 
nations. His theory offers a plausible explanation for many puzzling 
discoveries of the philosophers, and his book will give a fresh impulse to 
historic and prehistoric research. — Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Mr. Ignatius Donnelly has written a unique and interesting argument to 
prove that the legend of Atlantis is based upon fact, and that it tells of 
the first and one of the greatest of civilized nations, which a terrible con- 
vulsion of nature obliterated. — Congregationalist, Boston. 

All of this is very startling, but the author has made out a case which, 
if not convincing, is at least interesting and wonderfully plausible. His 
book shows, throughout, wide reading, logical clearness, and careful 
thought, and the work cannot fall to interest by the vast accumulation of 
out-of-the-way information it contains. — Saturday Evening Gazette., Boston. 

This is a most remarkable book, entertaining, instructive, and fascinat- 
ing to a degree. ... A book well worth reading. The world will never 
tire of the story of the lost Atlantis and of speculations in regard to it. 
It has been the theme of the poet and philosopher. Now it is brought 
to the test of science. — Brooklyn Union-Argus. 

If any one should get the impression that Mr. Donnelly's book is a 
foolish one, he will make a great mistake. There is an immense amount 
of knowledge accumulated, and some of his views have much more be- 
neath them than notions in science which have wide prevalence. What- 
ever may be thought of his conclusions, the facts he has assembled with 
regard to the Deluge and the several traditions concerning it, his com- 
parisons of the Old and New World civilizations, his analysis of the my- 
thologies of the Old World, and his discernment and selection of Atlan- 
tean colonies make up a marvellously interesting book. — Christian Advo- 
cate, N. Y. 

It has a strange interest to the general reader as well as to scientific 
students. — Evangelist., N. Y. 

He must have the credit, however, of giving to the public the most 
original volume of the season. — The Congregationalist, Boston. 

The book contains matter food for thought from the first page to the 
last, and its subject is so consequential that, if its major propositions can 
be considered proven, some of the most perplexing problems which the 
history of the human race offers to the investigator will, for the first time 
since the revival of civilization, be put in the Avay of satisfactory solution. 
— Evening Telegraph, Philadelphia. 



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THE COMMUNISTIC SOCIETIES OF THE UNITED STATES; from 
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AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS, 

Viewed from the Standpoint of Universal History. By John 
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Mr. Fiske is oue of the few Americans who is able to exercise 
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mmn politicul econoiih, 

PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By 

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In the present volume Professor Newcomb has directed his great powers 
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In a broad and profound consideration of the subject on both its scien- 
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and precision, and a weighty grasp of the great subject and its relations, 
no previous work on political economy can compare with this by Dr. New- 
comb. — Boston Evening Traveller. 

The merit of Professor Newcomb's treatment consists in thorough 
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its simple and clear logical statement and apt illustration, and in its gen- 
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i 



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unm WORKS on poliiicai economy 



SOME LEADING PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAX. 
ECONOMY NEWLY EXPOUNDED. By J. E. 
Cairnes, LL.D., late Emeritus Professor of Political 
Economy in University College, London. Crown 8vo, 
Cloth, |2 50. 

It is with great pleasure that we welcome another contribution to Po- 
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the doctrines which have hitherto passed muster as established principles. 
He brings to the task a remarkable power of sustained and accurate 
thought upon topics which are apt to bewilder an ordinary brain, and a 
capacity for lucid expression which is hardly less rare and admirable. — 
Saturday JRevieiv, London. 

It not only throws new light on some of the most important problems 
of the science, but it entirely recasts the theory of cost of production, and 
thereby clears away, to a great extent, the mists and fogs by which the 
doctrines of international trade and international values are surrounded. 
. . . The most important contribution which political economy has received 
for many years. — Athenmim, London. 

THE CHARACTER AND LOGICAL METHOD OF 
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V 



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HARPER'S MAMNE FOR 1886. 

With the December Number began the Seventy-second Volume of Harper's Maga- 
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The two novels now in course of publication— Miss Woolson's " East Angels " and 
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